Singer Roy Kim was the subject of a lengthy profile in the Magazine section of Friday's edition of the Washington Post.
The winner of the fourth season of the audition-based talent show "Superstar K" in 2012, Kim now enjoys relative anonymity as a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and lives a pretty typical student life, the paper said.
"Roy wasn't the product of the K-pop 'factory,'" the paper writes. "If there were a thing called K-folk, that's how Roy would describe his music. With names like 'Spring Spring Spring' and 'Love Love Love,' his songs are sweet and catchy."
After spending a year pursuing the life of a singer here, Kim moved to the U.S. to study. "I've spent more of my life trying to get into school than trying to be a musician, so it would be a waste if I stopped now," he's quoted as saying.
He goes on to say, "I want to come here before I get used to a celebrity life. If everybody treats you like a celebrity for a long time, you become full of yourself, and that's the last thing I want to be."
Kim plans to shuttle back and forth until he graduates, studying for a year in the U.S., then returning to Korea for a year to pursue music. While he plans to release English-language albums someday, for now his priorities are studying, releasing albums in Korea and completing his compulsory military service.
