On the next stop of our food tour around L.A.,
we've arranged to meet up with Woosung, AKA Sammy.
The legendary lead singer of The Rose.
He's a beautiful man.
So, I for one, am excited.
Not because he's beautiful.
I dunno that came out weird.
I think we're going somewhere fancy as well, Ollie.
I don't have a shirt.
But I do have a British accent and that goes a long way.
Good day to you sir. What a fine gentleman you are.
Look who it is.
Nice to meet you. (In Korean)
This is called Intercrew.
It's like a lounge, bar, restaurant place that I come to.
We've got a nice room for us today.
We've been filming with YouTubers this whole time.
We've gone up a class.
We are gonna eat here. (in Korean)
The boardroom.
The VIP treatment.
The VIP treatment yeah.
I am ready to make some corporate decisions.
We've come a long way since Taco Bell Ollie.
We have.
To get a place like this big and luxurious in ktown, it's hard to find.
You have to basically be a serious rising star.
No, no.
Let's go, your ultimate recommendations.
For starters, we’ll do the burrata toast, and we’ll also do the caesar salad.
For the main, we’ll do the wagyu bolognese, umi.
Can I also do the mussels and for the bread, you dip it in the…
We have to do the fried chicken.
We’ll do the Japanese wagyu sampler.
We’ll do every single one of the cocktails.
Is that right? ok.
One of each?
One of each.
This guy’s not messing around.
I already have a favourite drink.
Okay.
Now we’ll know.
Now we’ll find out.
I don't think I’ve ever seen Josh more happy.
And I was there on his wedding day.
I was his best man.
You are speaking my language.
This is straight to my heart.
This is burrata.
Dugong Burrata.
Like wang ddugong(Korean cup ramyun)?
Wang ddugong?
I do love wang ddugong.
It's a great starter.
It’s sweet.
You've never had umi before, have you?
I don't know what unni is.
It's auntie (unni in Korean).
Unni your thinking unni.
Unni is Korean.
Close.
So it looks like this.
That's a sea urchin.
It's a sea urchin.
I hate those guys.
I stepped on one in Cornwall once.
They are tasty.
One of my favourites.
I'm gonna enjoy my sweet revenge on this xxxx.
Wow, that is rich, full of flavour.
I really like the taste of umi.
Oh wow, that is good. That is really good.
I'm glad.
How can they be that evil in life and that tasty in death?
It's a give-and-take, it's a give-and-take.
So Sammy, you've been a singer for a while now.
For a while yeah.
First season of k-pop stars.
Yes, that is where I started.
OG.
Honestly, for me, music wasn't my main thing that I was pursuing in high school.
I actually wanted to be a psychologist and that's what I was hoping that my major would be in college.
And then my mom took me to this Korean church and I got to meet friends that were my age.
And they're like, yo Sammy you know k-pop? There's this group called 2NE1, 2pm, Big Bang.
And then I got into that, and then they're like, hey there's this audition.
You know we know how to all play the guitar and sing we should all go audition.
It's going to be awesome. We're going to meet more friends.
I was actually more of a dancer than a singer.
You must be so talented if singing is your third talent.
Have you heard this guy?
No, I was not that good at singing though.
We honestly didn't think we were going to make it.
It was not very serious. I just practised one song.
That's how it all started. I passed. They came to my house.
They shot the whole thing with my family.
You have a very cute smile.
Is it the hairstyle?
And as I got to do the show, I built this relationship with music
where I wanted to actually take it seriously.
So, that was almost your musical self-discovery was through doing a freaking reality tv show...
about making it in music. I mean it's so crazy.
I mean 18, 19, you're young at this point.
Gone over to Korea, as a trainee.
Not gonna lie, it was the hardest time for sure in my life.
It was tough.
It was very tough.
Going into it head-on, graduating and going right to Korea, being in this storm...
I didn't have free time.
The whole building was like my jail almost.
So, I was on the sixth floor. The fifth floor was a practising room.
And then the fourth floor was where the cafeteria was.
The only time I could leave was when I go to the gym.
Wow.
So, it became a thing where I started to kind of lose my purpose and what I was here for.
I didn't even know if I was in music anymore but after like a year I started
becoming really really depressed.
And I kind of lost who I was there.
After that, I came out of the company, I was like you know I can't stay here longer, three years.
I went into teaching English here and there.
I wanted to stay in Korea because I couldn't go back. I felt like I was a failure in a way.
Oh my gosh.
The good thing though after all these years when I think back at it is...
Once I lost myself, I truly got to see who I could be.
You know I think you would have been a good psychiatrist.
Thank you.
Listening to the way you're talking.
I don't know whether I've self-examined my own thoughts in my entire life as much as
you have in the last 5 minutes.
And I don't want to. Let's not go there.
Truffle mac and cheese.
So much of the truffle is that smell.
There you go. I love that smell.
What's this? I didn't even know we ordered this.
Jumbo shrimp.
Look at the size of that saewoo(shrimp in Korean).
That is incredible.
It looks like the emoji.
You're righ. It does look like the emoji.
Looks like a shrimp emoji.
Was there ever a point where you were like, you know what this is not worth it.
I don't really want to be a singer.
Actually, when I was there teaching English for a little bit...
For six months, I wasn't listening to music at all.
Music-related things, I was not looking at, hearing, nothing.
Because I was so sick of it.
Not even listening to music.
Honestly, it hurt me.
Not being able to make that happen for myself, it hurt me a lot at that age.
And then six-month mark hits and I get an offer from the hagwon.
"Okay."
"I think you were you're doing a good job. We're gonna give you a raise."
And I was like, I was conflicted at this point.
Because then, I felt like, if I took that job, that's the end.
That's going to be my you know...
It's like a fork in the road, as it were.
Yeah, that was going to be like, okay, I'm invested.
Because once I take that job and take that responsibility, there's no going back.
Yeah, there's no way you can be a psychiatrist after that.
Nothing like that.
That's the moment that really got me back to thinking about music.
I started listening to music again. I bought a whole new mic, a guitar amp.
Everything so I could record music now. I could make music.
And I fell in love all over again.
Wow, this is an incredible story.
Sorry guys, this is too serious. Let's eat.
No, it's amazing.
You're spoiling us here today.
Get a little bit of salt, a little bit of wasabi, I think I believe that is.
When you started writing music,
What was the first song you wrote?
Actually, it's funny. I have a video out on youtube. It's called beautiful girl.
I wrote it when I was 20.
Fast forward, I show my company this song. They're like, oh you already have a video.
Let's make a video just like that but now.
So we could put out the song actually. I was so against putting out the song.
Because it was like, I wrote this such a long time ago, it's embarrassing.
But 'Beautiful girl', that was my first song that I ever finished.
So this is where The Rose comes into the story, right?
Yeah, this is The Rose era.
How did you guys meet?
Dojoon, Jaehyoung, and Hajoon.
They were training in all different companies.
Oh, they were all trainees?
In different companies.
So you had a shared trauma.
Yeah, I mean like different traumas but maybe yeah.
There was something that we could, you know, made us come together.
So Dojoon, Jaehyoung, Hajoon meet. And started busking.
They were looking for a singer.
So then, one day we all meet because we're all drinking together.
Dojoon gets to see my k-pop star days.
He hits me up. He's like, hey...
You can sing.
Yeah. You can sing. You can play the electric guitar.
We need that.
And he started pitching their band to me.
And I heard it and I was like, there's no way.
I was like no.
Why?
I'm not gonna do it.
I was like I definitely don't want to go back into doing group things
when I finally got to do some solo things.
I'm not ready.
And you know Dojoon being Dojoon, he was like, okay well then can you help us with one show.
One show, we just need to do a show in Hongdae.
Classic.
It's the whole let's just do one drink.
And before you know it, it's 6am.
Just more cocktail.
You're like freaking bakcha.
I go into practice with them.
They were like just play like F, like G whatever blah blah blah, and they started.
And it's like right now F.
And I run that F, I played it, and as I play the F,
and when all the sounds came together to my ears, it made sense.
I was like ok, this is what I'm gonna do. I told them right there, let's do it.
Then I did the show, quit my job.
Talked to people that there were companies I was talking to at that point.
You know we were talking about solo deals.
And I was like actually, I'm only willing to sign if we sign with The Rose.
- Wow. - Amazing.
This is so cool. This is an amazing story.
I thought we were just gonna come and eat some food.
We weren't even called The Rose.
We were called Windfall.
This is a four-man band it's going to be like this.
We want Beatles, Coldplay, everything.
This is gonna be that.
Everybody we met in the industry, like before we debuted.
Everybody was like, hey this is not gonna work out, like you guys have to dance.
I was like...with a guitar.
And we had to fight our way, to make it our song with our first debut song.
What we wrote was called 'Sorry'.
That song actually you know, our drummer Hajoon...
We're in the practice room.
And he was just playing piano, he was lik,e hey I kind of came up with this melody.
I was like this is it. We finally have it.
And then I wrote the lyrics there, 20 minutes, I was like, okay it's going to be called sorry.
We shared it, we finished up the song.
And we knew then. Right, this is it. We did it. It's going to be huge.
This is our song.
This is going to be huge.
And we let everybody hear it.
It's so slow.
We didn't care. We already had a mindset.
I love this. It's like true creative vision.
And it worked right? It connected.
We got offered our first tour with having one song out and that song was 'Sorry'.
You got offered a tour for one song.
We're like, what do you guys expect us to do?
Like one song, cover songs?
But the thing is we did write a lot of songs prior to that.
We just hadn't released it.
If you're listening at home, just know that that is the power of a good apology, right?
They said sorry to the world.
We did.
- And they got a tour. - We apologized on everybody's behalf.
Yeah exactly.
In 2019, you're back on another singing competition show.
You're a sucker for punishment.
You know what though? I only did that because we could go out as a band.
Do you think there was a part of you that was like, you know what?
I'm gonna go back with my band that I'm like confident with. I know who I am, on my terms?
Yes and you know I was so confident because we'd been touring a lot.
We had already toured like 30 cities.
But I didn't know I was nervous until I went up. I started singing.
And right when I started singing, I got so nervous.
I think the trauma came back.
Yeah being in like an audition.
And there was a big pressure that I didn't feel up until that stage.
I know exactly how you feel because I've done noraebang.
It's all confidence until you're holding that microphone.
Yes, yes!
And you've got an album coming out, right?
Moth, it's an EP, four songs.
Moth, one of my least favourite insects.
Okay, that's why I called it Moth.
Can I explain this? Because I feel really strongly about this.
When you kill them, they're just dust.
Oh my gosh.
How does it fly? How does dust fly?
Okay, the main message is that butterflies and moths, they're the same insects, same category.
They basically are, right?
If you really look at them, very similar creatures, insects.
So my point is that butterflies fly in the daytime.
They're perceived as touchable, beautiful.
But as far as moths...
They're always flying in the night.
Everybody's like oh that's gross they're dirty, they try to kill it, they try to crush them and all this.
When in fact, with the light shining on their print, if they land on the light...
Their prints are actually as beautiful as butterflies.
And you know sometimes, we don't notice the true beauty
because we're so covered by all these images.
And all these like things in life that clouds our judgment.
I really wanted to dive into that perspective of, you know, anything could be beautiful.
And anything has a right to be beautiful.
Wow, I really look bad for pooping all over the moths.
Sammy.
Thank you.
This has been amazing, not only was this like the best food we've had since coming to L.A.
This is genuinely one of the most fascinating conversations we've had ever on our channel so thank you.
Thank you for having me, thank you, guys.
I'm glad you guys enjoyed the food.
All right guys.
See you jolly soon.
Bye.
Anyeong.