The Three Months That Started Everything: Yoon Jongshin, Stranded Next Door in the Hudson Valley

You'd be forgiven for thinking the Jongshin New York series was over. Five episodes, museum after museum, and a farewell in our garden. The end.

It wasn't the end. It was the middle. This week's video goes back to the beginning — the spring of 2020, when a global lockdown quietly stranded one of Korea's most famous songwriters in the town next to ours, for the better part of three months. Without those three months, none of the New York series you've been watching would exist.

Here's how it happened. Jongshin was in the middle of crossing America — his Nomad Project, a long-planned drive from Los Angeles to New York, making music at his own pace. The plan was a leisurely two-week trip. Then came the rumors that COVID might shut down travel between states, and a leisurely trip turned into a sprint. He booked the first place he could find on short notice.

That place happened to be one town over from Jinguk and me. We've known him since we were children. So an open-ended pandemic — the kind nobody had a timeline for — became something none of us planned: an open-ended life together.

And the Hudson Valley, of all places, turned into a recording studio. I won't walk you through what came out of those months, because the video does it better than a paragraph can. I'll give you exactly one thing, because it still makes me shake my head: the music video for his April single “Isolation” is a hand-painted animation — and Jinguk painted all 88 frames of it, by hand, in five days. That's the kind of detail that sounds made up. Watch it and you'll see it isn't.

A note on why this episode exists at all. It's a thank-you. The Jongshin fans who found this channel, subscribed, and stuck around are a real part of why we get to keep doing this. This one is for them.

How those three months ended — and where everyone went next — is in the video.

▶ Watch here: https://youtu.be/GVFJcmTSeSA

If the pandemic ever left you living alongside someone longer than either of you expected — a friend, a relative, a roommate who never quite left — I'd genuinely like to hear about it. Drop it in the comments.

If you're new here, subscribe — there's a second part coming. And leave a comment; I read them.

Yoon Jongshin, Hudson Valley, MigukTV, Korean musician New York, COVID lockdown, Monthly Yoon Jongshin, cross-cultural, New York life

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