마음 (Heart)

The song

‘마음’ (Heart) is a digital single by IU, released on 18 May 2015. It is a one-song release, and came seven months after the previous single, SOGYEOKDONG.

The album introduction lists it as a digital single and adds one line: “one small thing, fragile, that will go on quietly shining”. By the credits printed beside it, IU wrote the lyric and composed and arranged the song with Kim Je-hwi. Five months later it was placed on the CD edition of the fourth mini album CHAT-SHIRE.

Reviews

IZM reviewed the single in May 2015. Lee Jong-min opened by calling it “a song of the kind you could expect to run into in the early 1990s by turning on the radio in the middle of the day”, and found the choice unsurprising in the two records before it: “She had already begun working with composers of the 1990s on Modern Times (2013), and on A Flower Bookmark (2014) she carried out a serious study of old Korean popular song outright.” He wrote that “she knows better than anyone what music suits her tone and what music she expresses best”.

Idology (아이돌로지) carried two writers in its new-release column ‘1st Listen’ on 27 May 2015. Mimyo wrote: “If you ask whether it is simply breezy ‘girl pop’, the unusually close-recorded vocal walks the edge between husky and clear tone with breath mixed in, and the heart of a lyric whose contemplative address gives off a somewhat traditional scent is weighty enough.” He added that “when the main melody and the backing vocals combine and the timbre is pushed further forward, the borderline position IU occupies comes alive more attractively”.

Cho Seong-min wrote that “the song, which opens with a round, sweet piano sound, naturally makes the listener smile”. On its scoring he wrote that “on a song like ‘Heart’ she knows how to use a vocal that fills the song out comfortably while striking a sufficient balance with the barest instrumentation”.

Reviewing CHAT-SHIRE on 13 November 2015, Kim Se-cheol of weiv singled out this song, which appears only on that record’s CD. He wrote that “‘Heart’, on the CD alone this time, shines brightest among them”, and that “the heart of an unreturned love, carried by nothing but guitar, piano and a few layers of voice, sits well with a feeling at once clear and lonely”.

Afterwards

The fourth mini album CHAT-SHIRE followed five months later, on 23 October 2015, with this song as the eighth track of its CD edition.