The Void Calls in Lee Seungyoon’s “Shelter of Dreams”
When your heart is full of emotions and your head is about to burst from too many thoughts, listen to Lee Seungyoon’s “Shelter of Dreams.” The album of the same name was released on January 26, 2023 and was produced by the idol and Jo Heewon. With nine months in the making, Seungyoon explained that the album doesn’t follow a set context or narrative; it’s created for lonely souls who’ve lost their direction in life before they are “completely taken away by the void.”
The soft rock track is the perfect study song if you just want to get out of your own head. Perhaps mistaken for a love song, the hidden message talks about the many dreams one has but still seems to have no purpose in life. It talks about the anxiety of blindly following one dream then the other, like listening to a gut feeling that takes you nowhere. Everyone has that phase of not knowing what they want to do in life, having so many thoughts that it’s hard to process what your heart really wants. Should you be practical or realistic?
It’s easy to let these things pile up, but it also leads to them building and building until they finally cannot hold up anymore. In the music video, they explode in different forms. For example, the big pink ball that can’t fit through the door but finally escapes later on, or the trash that’s piled into a mountain that bursts at the end of the video. Even Lee Seungyoon’s shy dancing and dark appearance changes to a lighter color as he sings into a megaphone, and the dancer’s graceful choreography of falling null and void becomes jagged, being pulled in every direction.
When Lee Seungyoon wrote, “I don’t have a decent compass / I follow, but there is no North Star,”* he blindly followed his dream of being a singer, hoping it was the right decision. He wondered if it was better to be scared and to keep moving forward, or be glad to have some kind of purpose. In the chorus, Seungyoon envisions his dream like the North Star, which makes the “sunlight beam”* and the “blizzard stop”*—yet it leads to a void at the end of the road. Is it really a lie, a false sense of security? Where should he go, what should he do next? Is there no meaning in life?
Just like in the music video, everyone has that image of an abandoned mall in their head where the elevator’s wires are cut and you’re trapped, or where exaggerated codes cloud your judgment and you can’t see what’s happening in front of you. Though fans will always appreciate his decision to become an idol and will cheer him on through thick and thin, it doesn’t mean that your dreams are over, and it doesn’t overtake that looming shadow of doubt that keeps you grounded. But this song is Lee Seungyoon’s reminder for fans to stay true to yourself, even if you’re sometimes wrong.
*Translated by writer
Edited by Aleena Faisal