Kim Jung-Mi - Spring (1973)

There are songs that make you yearn for a time and place that was never yours. Spring by Kim Jung Mi is one such song. Released in 1973, this psychedelic folk masterpiece brings us a fresh spring day and blue skies from long ago.

And yes, it's absolutely a bop.

Here's some background:

At the dawn of the 1970’s, South Korea’s rock music scene was at its zenith. Much of the reason for this was the god-like musical touch of guitar wizard, songwriter, producer, and arranger Shin Joong Hyun. For this album, he took a young girl named Kim Jung Mi, and transformed her from a wallflower student into a folk-psych chanteuse in record time (if Francoise Hardy is the Marianne Faithful of France, then Kim Jung Mi is, I suppose, the Francoise Hardy of Korea). The ten songs on Now were written and recorded during 1973 with a firm mandate to create a truly psychedelic sound experience. On each number, Shin Joong Hyun and his backing group laid down pure emotion on tape. Mr. Shin’s fuzz guitar weaves in and out of the tracks, interlaced with his own poetic musings on nature (spring, sun, flowers, rain, and wind), all else in the world apart from Kim Jung Mi’s soothing voice and insistent bass that crouches and creeps, depending on its mood, displaced. This raw feeling, combined with Kim Jung Mi’s seductive, expressive vocals and empathetic string orchestration, resulted in an album that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Mr. Shin’s ethereal cover photo—the blue graininess of the sky dripping into fading clouds, with Kim Jung Mi surrounded on her sky-high isolated mountaintop by flowers—is the perfect image to represent what is, without a doubt, one of the best psychedelic albums ever created.

- Reddit

Spring has recently resurfaced as the opening song to a currently airing drama. And we're so lucky for it.

Check it out:

I spent my morning walking to the rest of the album, and it’s just as stunning. Haenim is another standout, and I also loved Wind, Your Dream, and It’s Raining.