Where U At

The song

‘Where U At’ is a digital single Taeyang released on 15 October 2009. The album introduction on Bugs, written by YG Entertainment, dates it a year and five months after his first solo mini album Hot, the one carrying ‘나만 바라봐 (Only Look At Me)’ and ‘기도 (Prayer)’. By that account Taeyang wrote the melody himself and is credited as co-composer alongside the producer Teddy. The lyric, it says, imagines and misses the partner he has yet to meet somewhere in the world. The introduction picks out the synthesiser figure in the opening bars as the song’s first impression, and notes that the music video carries nothing but his choreography, danced with dancers brought in from abroad.

Reviews

Cho Yi-seul reviewed the single for IZM in its October 2009 issue. The review says the members’ solo turns read like a statement of intent as musicians, and that on this one Taeyang again put his weight behind the writing beside the composer Teddy. It places the song as a slow groove following ‘Only Look At Me’, and finds that with the synthesiser in the opening and a polished rhythm programming there is no doubt they have arrived at a sound style of their own. The piece opens with the story Teddy tells about the four bars of intro that came to him while he was writing 2NE1’s ‘Fire’, follows what that synthesiser did across the length of that song, and only then turns to this single.

After it

The second digital single, ‘웨딩드레스 (Wedding Dress)’, followed a month later on 13 November. Its own album introduction states that ‘Where U At’ had gone out with no broadcast or promotion planned at all, and that the run of televised promotion began with ‘Wedding Dress’. Both songs were carried again on his first full-length album, Solar, the following year.