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“HeeSun Lee is a spoken word and hip-hop artist, a mother, and a wife who is trying to change the game up and break stereotypes.”
HeeSun Lee started listening to hip-hop during middle school. “I just loved the music. The whole concept of rhyming was very appealing to me.” At age eleven, she started memorizing and reciting lyrics, even recording them on a karaoke machine.
In her teen years, she started writing her own lyrics as an outlet to express her thoughts and personal experiences. “I just kept on rapping. I kept on writing. I started meeting people and going out there doing shows… it just kept getting bigger and bigger until I am here today.”
On March 8th, Lee released an EP called Flying Cars.
“It’s all about the future: this is who we are now, and this is where we have to aim to be.”
She wants to encourage listeners to try to continuously grow and seek to improve in all areas of their life.
At the start of the production process, she knew she wanted her project to be about the future but wasn’t sure what to call it. She and her team were “just throwing names out there, and someone said Flying Cars.” It was an unusual title, but when they decided on it, Lee noted that “it makes people think. Its a comparison to the future.”
She started writing for Flying Cars in late 2017. At first, it was a slow process, but it kept moving faster as time passed. “I just kept getting motivated. More things that I was seeing made me want to write.”
Lee wanted the album art to express the future not only through an image of a flying car and a cityscape but also through the image of a girl.
“She’s running towards the car. She is [representing] the future and she is what represents hope and the possibility for better days. She wants to get on the car [to] take off and go into the future.”
The girl seeks to illustrate Lee’s message of striving to continually move forward towards the future.
The album’s introductory song, “Future,” addresses how many women in pop-culture that girls look up to are not good role models. “They feel like this is the norm. This is what we’re supposed to be. I’m negating that and rebelling against that.” In the song, she wants to encourage girls that the better way to live is to follow Jesus.
“I want to take what I do and inspire people to live for greater.”
Flying Cars continues with “The Best is Yet to Come,” which was inspired by criticism that female rappers are not as good as their male counterparts. Lee believes that well-known female rappers like Nicki Minaj are on-par if not better than top male rappers, but notes that Minaj and many prominent female rappers do not promote virtuous living.
Lee considers this song to be in-line with the futuristic message not because she is trying to tell listeners who she is and where she came from, but because she seeks to express how much potential she has to make a difference in the future.
Efforts to select an album title also lead to the selection of a song title. “Somebody joked and said, Yo, you should name your album Delorean.'” Lee didn’t think that was a good idea, but then thought “I could put a track called Delorean on there because it goes with the theme of Flying Cars.”
In the well known Back to the Future movie trilogy which was released between 1985 and 1990, a DeLorean car was used as a time machine, bringing the characters into the past as well as the future, to the year 2015, in which everyone had flying cars.
The first verse of “Delorean” shows Lee responding to critics saying that she needs to change her music to be successful. “This is who I am, and this is what I’m gonna do, and you’re gonna see.” In the second verse, she addresses how people do not take their seriously the weight of their eternal future and how their decisions impact it.
“Do you ever think of what’s going to happen to you [when you die]? Do you get worried?” She warns listeners of the unpleasant reality of Hell.
“When you first give birth and have your child, the most secure place that a baby feels is on their mother’s lap. When a birth mother gives up their child, they don’t have the baby in their lap anymore, and they feel emptiness.”
Outside of music, HeeSun Lee loves spending time with her daughters Kayla and Jocelyn and her husband, Tim.
Follow HeeSun Lee on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Get or stream Flying Cars here.
This post HeeSun Lee Talks Motherhood, New EP ‘Flying Cars’ was seen first on Jam the Hype.
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