Eric Nam’s new album There And Back Again (out today, January 7th), kicks off the first track, “Lost On Me,” with a resigned confession many will find familiar: “When we met, I was stuck in a troubled headspace.”
A neat seven songs later, on the poetic, pleading “One Way Lover,” things don’t feel all that different: “What’s my name sitting next to inside of your head, if it’s even there?”
There And Back Again as an album title indicates something cyclical, and while the LP has some lyrical bright spots (namely the previously released single “Any Other Way”), it feels, as a whole, like the story of someone who moves through a number of experiences only to end up in a similar place.
“Very astute observation,” Nam says of this assessment, speaking with Consequence over Zoom. “It was a tough year in many ways, and it all kind of came out into the music.”
There And Back Again, on a more literal level, also summarizes the series of events that led up to this release, Nam’s first as an independent artist. He’s spent the past decade working primarily in the K-pop world, where new music meant performances on specific music shows, detailed schedules, and a more intense recording process. Raised near Atlanta, Nam moved to South Korea after graduating from college, where his career as an artist and interviewer quickly took off — yet it was the recent return to America that was the catalyst for exploration as an indie musician.
