시작 (Start)

There is a specific quality to the way this song opens — guitar building slowly, anticipation accumulated measure by measure before the vocal enters — that signals immediately that you are in the presence of something designed for climactic moments. 가호's voice, when it arrives, has a rawness at its edges that the polished production never fully smooths away, and that roughness is the emotional mechanism: it sounds like someone who has been waiting to say something for a long time and is finally saying it at full volume. The song became iconic as the OST for a story about proving oneself against impossible odds, and the fit was exact — this is music about beginning, about the courage required to take a step when you don't know where it leads. The chorus opens into a sound that is simultaneously intimate and stadium-scaled, electric guitar and full-throated vocal creating something that functions as both private anthem and communal shout. The emotional arc moves from vulnerability to defiance without betraying either — you feel both the fear and the decision to move through it. Korean drama OSTs have produced an enormous amount of music in this mode, but "Start" distinguished itself because the production and the performance arrived at the same emotional truth simultaneously, neither outpacing the other. It is music for the first step of something difficult, played loudest precisely when the difficulty is most apparent.