Real

The record

Real is IU’s third mini album, released on 9 December 2010 with seven tracks. The title track is ‘Good Day’. It is the first album to follow Nitpicking, the single she released that June.

The album introduction on Bugs says the record was produced jointly by Cho Young-chul and Choi Gap-won, and names Yoon Sang, Kim Hyung-suk, Yoon Jong-shin, Lee Min-soo, Shinsadong Tiger and Kim Eana among the writers and composers who worked on it. By the same text the title is meant literally: the record sets down an unadorned, natural picture of the singer. ‘Good Day’ was composed by Lee Min-soo to a lyric by Kim Eana, and the introduction describes it as a track on the scale of a musical number, built on a string arrangement and a funky brass rhythm, with violin, brass, guitar and organ solos trading phrases with the vocal.

Reviews

IZM reviewed the title track on its own in December 2010. Seong Won-ho opened by calling it a single that will be welcomed by anyone who has been looking for an idol who can sing and for a bracing, clear-running vocal. Pointing to what it takes to build an impression on singing alone in idol music, he wrote that “being able to shape an image by vocal alone, in an idol music that requires a performance alongside it, is a considerable ability”. The same piece reported that the high-note passage at the end of the song was talked about enough after release to be nicknamed the “three-stage combo” or “three-stage booster” online, and to be parodied.

Billboard placed ‘Good Day’ at the head of “The 100 Greatest K-Pop Songs of the 2010s”, published on 25 November 2019. The entry, signed with initials only, calls the song “the epitome of K-pop’s rare ability to cross unexpected genres and make them mainstream, as orchestral instruments harmonize with unexpected blasts of brassy horns”. It closes: “A song like IU’s ‘Good Day’ defines this decade not only because it speaks specifically to the 2010s, but because it speaks to any decade and ultimately lets musicality take center stage.”

Among the tracks

‘Good Day’ is the third track on the record. The album introduction says its lyric draws the ache of a girl who likes someone and cannot bring herself to say so.

The opening track, ‘Not Like This’, was written by Kim Hyung-suk. The introduction describes it as the first Shibuya-style electronic mid-tempo song she had attempted, and points to the arrangement that runs through it. The fourth track, ‘The Night of the First Breakup’, is Yoon Jong-shin’s, and by the same text it draws one dazed, flustered day after a parting. The fifth, ‘Lonely Room’, was composed by Jeon Seung-woo, with a lyric written by Choi Gap-won together with IU herself.

The second track, ‘What I’m Doing Slow’, was written by PJ and Min Woong-sik to a lyric by Choi Gap-won; the introduction says its lyric is about doing the forgetting slowly, to love the other person a little longer. The closing ‘Merry Christmas Ahead’ is Shinsadong Tiger’s, and the same text notes that Thunder of MBLAQ, whom she had known since their trainee years, takes the rap.

Numbers

In “The 100 Greatest K-Pop Songs of the 2010s”, published by Billboard on 25 November 2019, ‘Good Day’ placed number one of the hundred.

Afterwards

The single Real+ followed two months later, on 17 February 2011, and the second full-length album Last Fantasy came that November.