My Year as a My Day

For my regular readers, this article might look like a needlessly lengthy puff piece about an artist you’ve likely never heard of from a genre you probably don’t care much about. And I’ll admit it: On the surface, this article is mostly me gushing about the K-pop group DAY6. However! The heart beneath the surface (and the main reason why I took time away from album mixing and book editing over the past few weeks to write this) is the encouraging joy that I’ve experienced by continuing to find new favorite bands and all-time favorite songs well into my 30s. Whether you’ve stumbled onto this article during your lunch break, on a bus ride, or in the evening before going to bed, I hope you’ll stick around and afford me some time to share stories about parenting, about songwriting, about who I was in 2024, and how it all coalesced into this past year being the perfect timing for me to discover my new favorite band.

Perhaps the feeling isn’t mutual, but as both a rabid music-lover and a musician/songwriter, it is extremely important for me to believe these two things: that the ability for human beings to write incredible, timeless music did not cease in the 1900s, and that music can still have high-impact, life-changing, heart-lifting, worldview-shifting effects on people long after they’ve entered into adulthood. Yet the prevailing experience for so many of us is that we eventually “mature” into an attitude of, “They don’t make it like they used to.”

Multiple modern studies have found that new music discovery peaks for most people at age 24, and during my mid-to-late 20s, it appeared as if I was fitting into that statistic with precision. 2016 was the year I turned 24, and for the remainder of the 2010s, 2016 appeared to be the final watershed year of new music for me. That year blessed me with at least a dozen albums that I loved; almost a decade later, a handful have proven to be lasting favorites (such as The Dear Hunter’s Act V or Wolves at the Gates’ Types & Shadows). In 2017, I began writing and podcasting as a music critic; my finger was on the pulse of new music, and new releases remained a substantial portion of my overall music diet. However, new “favorites” were few and far between. I would occasionally hear albums that I deemed worthy of 5-star ratings, but even those rare instances were frequently late-career masterpieces from artists I’d already been listening to for ages (such as Emery’s Eve or Kirk Franklin’s LONG LIVE LOVE). At the turn of the decade, even as I began releasing my own solo music into the world (with 2020’s Unfall), I was still trying and failing to connect with new music in the same life-impacting, taste-expanding manner as I had in my teens and early 20s.

The tide finally shifted in 2021, with the release of idle threat’s blurred visions, Benjamin Daniel’s Shelterheart (both artists who were relatively new), and cinema staff’s Kaitei. That third one was especially big for me. Despite Kaitei being the Japanese band’s seventh album, I’d never heard of cinema staff prior to 2021, and my next-level adoration for this latest album also marked the biggest leap I’d ever taken into enjoying non-English music.

The following years continued to provide all-time favorite albums on that “life-impacting, taste-expanding” level that I had once feared was a thing of the past (including new releases from the likes of The Dear Hunter, John Van Deusen, Plead the Widow’s Cause, Nick Webber, Official HIGE Dandism, and cinema staff). But I’d now like to skip ahead to the fall of 2024, when I happened across a band that would significantly influence my music listening, my own songwriting, and even my own parenting: the aforementioned DAY6.

[Please note: As I share my story about this past year, I will be saving some of the nerdy stats and song-specific details for the very end of this article. Stick around for the bullet points at the bottom if you’d like to read those! Also, the beginning of this story has some overlap with my blog post from a few weeks ago, which was written more from the angle of how my daughter has also come to love the music of DAY6. I have mostly aimed to avoid redundancies between the two articles. So if you haven’t read that post yet, it’s certainly not necessary, but you’ll get some extra details and other fun stories if you do! Click here to read “My Favorite Song of 2025.”]

When my wife and I were preparing to have our first daughter in the summer of 2023, we had an idealized plan to keep her out of daycare by juggling our work-from-home jobs with parenting her. Little did we know that our crazy little Vivian would be an attention-loving goblin who, from her earliest days, was never okay with being left by herself. All of her activities needed to include me or my wife with her, paying attention to her; even during her naps, Vivian preferred to be held and would rarely nap for long when left alone in her crib. It quickly became clear that parenting her well while juggling our jobs wouldn’t be an option — we needed to find a daycare by the time my wife’s maternity leave ended.

[I promise this tangent will be pertinent soon.] Looking back, we have zero regrets about placing Vivian in daycare; it’s been a wonderful way for her to receive early education and to socialize with other kids. But it was important to us that Vivian was spending more time with us than she was spending at daycare, so we only enrolled her in part-time care (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). To accommodate this, we packed as much work as we could into those three days, thus freeing us up on Tuesdays and Thursdays to be more lenient with work and more present with her. This was our routine for the first four months of 2024, until I was unexpectedly let go from my job a few months before Vivian’s first birthday.

My transition from salaried work into freelancing meant that I was now spending most Tuesdays and Thursdays alone with Vivian. Two common ways we killed time together were: 1) hanging out at my local Starbucks, where she loved people-watching and where the baristas loved baby-watching; and 2) chilling in our living room, where we’d snack, play with toys, practice new motor skills, etc., often with YouTube playing in the background. I’m adamantly opposed to much of modern kids’ programming, for the sake of her development and my own sanity, so you never would’ve seen us watching dreck like Cocomelon. Most often, I’d play informational videos about topics which interested me (music production, book editing, etc.) — the type of stuff which could innocuously be playing in the background while Vivian stayed focused on her coloring or other activities — but the ideal scenario was to find videos we both could enjoy. In my exploration, I tried showing her K-pop music videos, and this was our first big win-win category. She was drawn to the elaborate music and the colorful, high-production music videos; and as her walking skills developed, she also enjoyed trying to copy the dance moves onscreen. (An early favorite of ours was “Heartbeat” by TAN, which, to this day, features some of the slickest and most physically-demanding group dance moves I’ve ever seen).

That brings us back to our favorite hangout spot from Vivian’s early days: Starbucks. One morning, while ordering breakfast, I noticed Korean characters tattooed on the arm of the barista at the cash register. I inquired about the tattoo, only to discover that she was an impassioned K-pop fan. (The tattoo was a reference to the K-rock band The Rose.) Naturally, I asked her for recommendations, and she very excitedly told me that she thought I’d enjoy the music by… go ahead, take a guess… WOODZ. Did you guess WOODZ? I immediately streamed a few of his songs and liked what I was hearing, in particular the songs “Amnesia” and “Drowning.” (Fun fact: unbeknownst to me, “Drowning” had recently taken off as an unexpected viral hit in South Korea, and to this day, a whole year later, it remains one of the most popular songs in the country.)

Later that night, back home with Vivian, I looked up a WOODZ music video and allowed the YouTube auto-play algorithm to take over. That was our usual pattern: pick a random video, then let the videos keeps coming unless we’re not enjoying them. Usually, starting with a boy band would lead to videos by a wide array of other boy bands; likewise, a video from a girl group would be followed by loads of other girl group videos. However, the auto-play algorithm was quite different for WOODZ, this rock-leaning solo artist who largely writes and produces his own music; rather than showing me tons of other artists, the auto-play algorithm was dead-set on introducing me to a similar artist I’d never heard of before: DAY6.

I’m not confused why YouTube would view WOODZ and DAY6 as similar artists; what confused me is that, no matter which WOODZ song I started with, his video would always be followed by multiple DAY6 videos, sometimes circling back to another WOODZ song before returning to show me even more DAY6 songs. In those mid-September days, ironically enough, my first impression of DAY6 wasn’t particularly high; it certainly wasn’t love at first sight (or sound?). But as I wrote in my previous article about the band, “Immediately, this group was different, most evidently because the members all played instruments instead of danced, with plenty of guitar-led songs that veered in a rock direction. But it soon became clear that Vivian was enjoying DAY6’s songs more consistently than songs from other artists; it was also notable that, when she danced to other songs, she was often trying to copy the dance moves onscreen, whereas when she bounced and danced to DAY6’s music, there wasn’t any dancing in the videos for her to imitate. Her dancing stemmed solely from her enjoyment of the songs, such as early standout ‘days gone by.'”

I mean no offense to the immensely talented Mr. WOODZ, but my interest in him was rather swiftly pushed aside by DAY6, especially once the band’s newest single and music video at the time (“Melt Down“) showed up on our auto-play. For reasons I’ll explain later, this song really swept me off my feet, and it (along with “days gone by”) became the main impetus for me to stream the band’s music later that same month; in fact, thanks to the data tracked by my lastfm account, I can say with certainty that the very first thing I streamed by DAY6 was the mini-album featuring “days gone by”; the following day, the next thing I listened to was the mini-album featuring “Melt Down.”

I want to dovetail this part of the story into sharing why this was the absolute perfect time for me to discover this band, first from the perspective of this special moment in their career, and then from the perspective of where I was as a person, as a musician, and as a music lover.

Regarding the band’s history, I just narrowly missed discovering the band while they’d been taking a lengthy hiatus (three years in between album releases, including about two years of total inactivity while the members fulfilled their government-required military service). The band made its big return in the months prior to me discovering them, with a reunion concert in December 2023 followed by a new mini-album in March 2024. Far too much occurred in the preceding years for me to recount in detail here, but the main gist of it is that, much to the surprise of the band, their music had exploded in reach and popularity while they were on hiatus. Back in 2021, they’d just lost one of their founding members (Jae), after six long and arduous years of striving to make great music and to leave a lasting mark in an industry which, largely, had little interest in rock music or in pop stars who played instruments instead of danced. Then, during the pandemic, all those years of toil paid off. A whole new generation of fans discovered DAY6’s immense back catalog, as they sought out art that was more meaningful, substantive, and encouraging than the frothy, shallow, and sex-obsessed pop music that prevailed throughout most of the industry.

Thus when DAY6 returned as a four-piece in late 2023, they received the welcome of a fan base far larger than the one they’d left behind. And when they released their comeback mini-album in March 2024, their excited fan base turned two songs from the album into enduring hits that, a year and a half later, are still two of the most popular songs on South Korea’s largest music streaming service, Melon. (Those two songs are “Welcome to the Show” and “Happy,” the latter of which, astoundingly, has arguably become the most successful song in the band’s history, despite never formally being released as a single. These two songs also happen to be two of my daughter’s favorites.) The band quickly followed up this massive comeback success with Band Aid on September 2, 2024, mere weeks before I discovered the band; and the big single from Band Aid, “Melt Down,” is not only a large reason why I dug further into the band’s discography, but even now, having spent the past year becoming intimately familiar with all of DAY6’s music, “Melt Down” remains my favorite song the band has made — a massive triumph for a band nine years into their career.

If Band Aid‘s release last September marked the band’s 9th anniversary, then this current month marks both my one-year anniversary of knowing the band as well as the band’s 10th anniversary together. And oh, what a year it’s been! As I learned bits and pieces of the history which I’ve summarized above, it felt like I was getting swept up into this incredible underdog tale, where the good guys were finally winning; this superbly talented group of men, who truly desired to make great music that would stand the test of time, were finally receiving nationwide recognition. They were seeing new songs become hits as older, pre-hiatus songs also had massive resurgences. Basically everything I learned about them made them easier to root for, such as the story that they were the first group to demand that a popular TV show allow them to sing and play their instruments live rather than miming along to backing tracks. Through and through, these guys were the real deal, and I found myself increasingly drawn to listening through their releases as well as watching and listening to their concert footage, which was uniformly excellent.

The band members include bandleader and guitarist Sungjin, pianist Wonpil, bassist (and primary lyricist) Young K, and drummer Dowoon. As of today, it’s very hard for me to pick a favorite member, considering how much talent, character, and variety they each impart to the unit as a whole, but back in 2024, the clear winner was Sungjin. As a fellow guitarist, I was naturally drawn to him, but additionally, the grit and timbre of his voice was extremely compelling. So you can potentially imagine my unbridled excitement when, in mid-October, as I’m falling in love with DAY6’s whole discography, the news comes out that Sungjin is about to release his solo debut. The resulting album, 30, dropped in early November and quickly became one of my favorites of the year; in fact, despite being released with only 8 weeks remaining in the calendar year, it wound up as my second most-streamed album of 2024.

30 continues to be one of my go-to comfort albums, even though it wasn’t at all what I was hoping for. I’m a rock music guy at heart, so many of my favorite DAY6 songs are their more guitar-driven entries. Since Sungjin is the band’s guitarist, my expectations were that he’d be making a rock album that fully utilized the grit and rasp of his voice. Instead, the album shares more in common with the types of music I grew up with: soft rock, golden oldies, Brill Building pop, etc. It’s effectively an “easy listening” album, which can also be said of the 2022 debut full-length from the pianist, Wonpil. Wonpil’s album (released mere weeks before his military enlistment) leans even further into those mid-19th century influences, featuring multiple songs which straight-up sound like they were plucked from 1960s tape recordings. I was impressed that these young dudes from within the modern pop machine had such classy, old-fashioned tastes, and it also made them feel like kindred spirits (as someone who unabashedly names Barry Manilow as one of my all-time favorite artists and biggest musical influences).

Not only was the release of Sungjin’s album a crazy instance of inspired timing, but his album also served as the catalyst for me to dig into the solo releases of the other members Without competition, the most prolific member of the band is bassist Young K, who writes music for himself and other artists, writes most of the lyrics for DAY6, and even regularly posts acoustic cover songs on YouTube. To my surprise, Young K was the artist who fulfilled the guitar-rock hopes that I had imposed upon Sungjin’s album; Young K is the most-genre jumping solo member, but for much of his solo work, he trades in the bass for the electric guitar. Two of his singles, “let it be summer” and “nothing but,” have even become favorites of my wife Paige and our daughter Vivian. (The drummer Dowoon, who doesn’t sing frequently in DAY6’s music, has only released one song as a soloist, but it’s a lovely jazz-pop duet which I highly recommend.)

As I hinted at earlier, the generosity of new music from these four guys continued with the May 2025 release of the single “Maybe Tomorrow” and its b-side “game over.” As best as I can tell, “Maybe Tomorrow” is my two-year-old daughter’s favorite song of all time. (I feel very sad for the parents who have to deal with kids who sing “Baby Shark” over and over; I feel very privileged that a mature and beautiful song on the caliber of “Maybe Tomorrow” is the one that my daughter wants to watch and hear on repeat.) Sometime over the summer, I saw someone post on Reddit that every time the band has released a standalone digital single, it’s been followed by a full-length album; this rumor had me extremely excited, and when DAY6 played a new song live in late July or early August, it all but confirmed that rumor to be true. The following album, aptly titled The DECADE, came out on September 5; and its release has fueled a crazy, unhinged binge of their music… which catches us up to the present moment, where, on the date of this article’s publication, DAY6 has, in the span of exactly one year, just become the most-streamed artist in the history of my lastfm account.

Something I’ve wondered over the past twelve months is, what makes DAY6 so different from other artists I’ve discovered recently? How did they so quickly catch up to and outpace artists that I’ve already spent years listening to? For example, my all-time favorite Korean musician is the female solo artist IU, whom I discovered back in 2012. However, I didn’t listen to a full album by her until she released Palette in 2017 (which I purchased on a whim, back before I used streaming services). I don’t remember for sure, but I think a few more years would pass before I’d listen through her entire discography. It was a slow process, but within a few years (around 2020), her discography had become one of my favorite things to listen to while I worked. I could start a work shift by pressing play at the top of her Spotify discography and letting it continue throughout the day, no skips. Currently, she has three albums that rank highly among my most-streamed albums of the 2020s; I specifically remember, when Spotify rolled out its “Spotify Wrapped” campaign at the end of 2023, my “Top Songs” playlist contained nearly every single track from those three favorite IU albums.

I experienced similar difficulties getting into the discography of Japanese emo rock band cinema staff. I shared briefly towards the start of this article that their album Kaitei became my favorite album of 2021. It remains my favorite release by any artist of the 2020s thus far; yet as much as I adored that one album, it didn’t compel me to immediately eat up their formidable discography. They’d released 13 years’ worth of music prior to Kaitei, and with that many albums, EPs, and one-off singles to dig through, I hardly knew where to start. I eventually (and slowly) worked my way through them, but it wasn’t a fruitful experience. They had a handful of albums I didn’t connect with at all (at the time). As of today, I can gleefully sit down with any of cinema staff’s albums or excitedly listen to their entire discography on shuffle, but it was a multi-year journey to get to this point.

There’s an argument to be made that DAY6 makes music that’s more readily accessible or immediately gratifying than that of cinema staff, and that very well might be true (at least for some listeners); but I think the “perfect timing” of discovering DAY6 when I did is that they got to enjoy the benefits of my experiences with other foreign language artists. Being able to enjoy music outside of one’s native language has been much like exercising a muscle. In the early days, there was something truly exhausting about it. Even making it through an entire album could be difficult; my lack of familiarity with the language made it harder to comprehend the songs or even to follow the structures of what I was hearing (“Was that the chorus?”). Last October, I made my way through every DAY6 album over the course of a few weeks, but doing so enjoyably was only possible on the other side of having spent years exercising this muscle and learning how to enjoy non-English music. (Side note: This is a major reason why, when I’ve introduced friends to DAY6 over the past year, I’ve usually tried to do so one song at a time, rather than full albums at a time; I’ve learned how exhausting it can be to listen to a bunch of music where the lack of verbal comprehension makes it harder to grasp onto the audio information that we utilize for our ears to make sense of unfamiliar music.)

Admittedly, I feel like I’m burying the lede here, but the biggest reason why DAY6 swept in and became such a major influence in my life is that, in my own professional and musical journey, they showed up exactly when I needed them. And that’s (surprise, surprise) thanks to their lyrics. No, I didn’t very quickly learn how to speak Korean, and if I’m being totally honest, I’m still quite ignorant about the meanings behind many of their songs. But there are a handful of songs where I’ve been able to read English translations of the lyrics (thanks to YouTube captions shown while we watched music videos in our living room). I mentioned earlier that “Melt Down” was a particularly important song for me, and aside from adoring the song’s music, melodies, upbeat rock energy, and colorful music video, it had a profound impact on my life when I read its lyrics for the first time. To summarize, its lyrics are about the ways which we can become numb, distant, and emotionally frozen, yet how the kindness and care of the people in our lives can melt down our icy exteriors so that we can be honest and connected once again.

The context of my life at this point in time is vital. Earlier in 2024, I had launched my membership community (called the Friends Club), where people could pitch in a dollar or two each month in support of my music and freelancing efforts, and in return, they’d receive perks such as monthly songs and weekly podcast episodes. It was my goal at the time to turn 2024’s monthly songs into a full-length album by the year’s end. For a litany of reasons (not worth getting into here), that album remains unfinished, as of penning this article. The album’s ten songs have been written since the end of 2024, but back in September of that year, I was utterly stumped. I had multiple songs that I’d started but didn’t know how to finish. I’d run into many false starts, thrown-away drafts, ideas that went nowhere, etc. Meanwhile, I was feeling crushed by my own artistic aspirations to write the most profound, poetic, artful lyrics of my life. I wanted this album to unquestionably be the greatest thing I’d ever made, but the weight of those expectations was making it impossible to finish the final few songs.

Enter “Melt Down.” I was so moved by its simple, honest, and emotional lyrics that it brought me to tears; and it reminded me of something vitally important, which I’d lost sight of. Without realizing it, I’d moved the goalposts of what I wanted to accomplish with my music. I was blindly, arrogantly focused on composing lyrics that were poetic, artsy, and (ultimately) impressive. And therein lied the problem: I was more interested in impressing people than in helping or encouraging people. “Melt Down” was the song that woke me up from my stupor. The song was sonically dense and creatively satisfying, yet its straightforward, earnest lyrics were disinterested in accomplishing anything besides encouraging and uplifting its listeners. Why couldn’t I do that, as well?

This revelation helped me see my album to conclusion (at least, in terms of writing it — recording and mixing it has been an entirely different ballgame, but I digress). I wish the songs were ready to share with you (though the demos for most of them are available for Friends Club members), but I’ll go ahead and share how DAY6 helped me finish writing the album. Two songs had been stumping me the most: “Colors You See” and “Latent Magic.” Both were sitting around the 6-minute mark — making them two of the longest and most ambitious compositions of my life. I had tried and failed to write lyrics with a grandeur which matched the music, to the point where I lost track of what the songs were even about. I didn’t know anymore. Only after “Melt Down”‘s lesson sank in was I able to return to these songs and write lyrics I was proud of; and I did this by redirecting my focus on lyrics which would have an immediately encouraging effect on listeners, rather than burying some encouraging lesson deep beneath layers of poetry and metaphor. Later in the year, this reinstated goal of creating encouraging music helped me to complete the lyrics for the album’s opener “I’ve Arrived” and its title track, “Readybloom.” As I wrote and arranged the music for these final few tracks, I wound up sneaking in a few more nods to DAY6, as well: “I’ve Arrived” contains a musical homage to the 2024 single “Welcome to the Show,” and “Latent Magic” contains a melody inspired by “I Would” (a deep cut from their 2017 debut album SUNRISE).

[If you’re reading this but don’t have a way to keep up with me, I’d love for you to sign up for my monthly newsletter, that way you can hear these songs in the near future once they’re completed!]

It’s absolutely insane to me that, thousands of words into this article, there’s still more that I could say about how this band has positively affected my life. Learning to sing their songs has pushed me as a vocalist and allowed me to gain greater control of my upper range and head voice (which, all credit where its due, is also thanks to my wife and some killer guidance she gave me). Their music has given my wife, my daughter, and me something really fun and special that we can bond over. It’s still crazy to me, the way this band’s music brings something joyful and rhythmic and jubilant out of Vivian, unlike anything we’ve witnessed with other media we’ve shown her. Seeing how calm and soft-spoken the band members are in interviews has inspired me to be a more gentle and reserved person. And the way that their music inspired me to be a more encouraging songwriter has spilled out into the rest of my life, making me think of ways that I can be a more encouraging human being in general, rather than giving into the snark and sarcasm and cynicism of our age, and rather than always trying to be the funniest or most impressive person in the room.

A bit further down, the final section of this article contains statistics, details, and granular stories, which I separated from the main narrative above in order to avoid being confusing. The bullet points below also get into more of my favorite songs and albums by DAY6, many of which I avoided listing or mentioning above, so that unfamiliar readers wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. The audience for the final section, then, would probably be the big DAY6 fans or the fellow lastfm users who enjoy streaming numbers, personal records, and the like. But before moving on to those bullet points, I want to conclude the main narrative of the article by reflecting upon what’s next for me and maybe even for you.

In terms of what’s next for you, I want to invite you to listen to two Spotify playlists which I’ve spent (too much) time over the past few weeks carefully curating. The first is “the Best of DAY6,” featuring 25 of my favorite songs from their large discography of over 100 original, Korean-language compositions. In very biased fashion, this list is loosely based on my own most-listened songs by the band; however, rather than trying to make an exact ranking of my favorite songs in order, I put a lot of work into giving the playlist an album-like flow, prioritizing overall dynamics and smooth song-to-song transitions. I also aimed to include 1-3 songs from each album (or mini-album/EP) that the band has released. (Notably, this playlist excludes the 9 or so songs which tend to be mainstays in DAY6’s “top ten” on Spotify; therefore, this playlist is perfect for both newcomers and for people who might only be familiar with the band’s biggest hits. However, if you are a newcomer and like what you hear, then circling back around to the band’s top songs would be essential.)

The second playlist features another 25 songs, except these come from the four members’ solo output, the side project Even of Day, and DAY6’s Japanese-language songs. I’ve enjoyed listening back through this “Best of DAY6 Solo, Even of Day, & J-Rock” playlist (and think you will, too!) because, while I aimed once again to give this playlist a great flow with smooth transitions, it’s just really fun to be thrown back and forth across so many styles by so many different projects. With both playlists combined, you’ll get to hear DAY6’s adventurous mastery across a multitude of musical flavors and genres, all performed and produced to a level of undeniable expertise.

If you’re reading this as someone who’s unfamiliar with the band, you might still be confused about this article’s seemingly nonsensical and grammatically incorrect title: “My Year as a My Day.” The term “My Day” refers to the DAY6 fanbase, with individual fans being called “My Days.” (Similarly, you are likely familiar with Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters” or Beyoncé’s “Beyhive.”) This term originates from a song titled “My Day” (which you’ll hear if you listen to my “Best of DAY6” playlist), and as best as I can tell, the early fanbase organically adopted this song title as their collective fandom name. I don’t recall at what point last year I learned about the “My Day” fandom, but as soon as I stumbled upon this information, I felt happy and honored to consider myself among their ranks.

But does this mean that I’m a crazed superfan who’s going to get DAY6 tattoos and take the next flight to South Korea to see them live? No. In fact, as I finish writing this article, I feel a certain level of peace about allowing this DAY6-saturated year to come to a satisfying conclusion. Drafting this lengthy exposé (and listening to the band almost non-stop while writing and editing it) has felt like a capstone event for me, closing this chapter of my life after twelve months of streaming these songs thousands of times, learning about the members and their stories, watching music videos and interviews and behind-the-scenes docs, and loving every minute of it. I feel comfortable saying that I will likely consider myself a “My Day” for the rest of my life, and saying that I will likely never again have a year where I listen to their music with such dense concentration.

In some regards, I need to move on, as well. As of publishing this article, we are less than ten days away from the release of Horizons/West, the highly-anticipated new album from my all-time favorite artist, Thrice. The rest of October is likewise filled with other albums I’m excited to spend time with (John Van Deusen, Citizens, Psallos, Yellowcard, Hail the Sun, Greyhaven, The First of October, just to name a few!). Then the remainder of 2025 will see me redirecting my attention to finishing the mixing of my fourth full-length solo album, completing the book edits for a handful of authors who are working with me, refocusing on Christian-market releases for my work as a staff writer/podcaster with Jesusfreakhideout, and most importantly of all, taking care of my second daughter, who’s due to be born in mid-October. (!!!)

Yet for all the life events, responsibilities, and other musical interests that will steal me away from DAY6, I also know that they will continue being part of the life of my family. My wife Paige and I have been discussing plans to translate and cover multiple songs by DAY6 and Young K. Meanwhile, nearly 6 months since its initial release, “Maybe Tomorrow” continues to be my firstborn daughter’s favorite song in the world; sometimes, it seems like “Maybe” might continue to be her favorite song for years to come. And who knows, maybe our second-born daughter will end up loving DAY6’s music as much as her big sister does. I can’t wait to find out.

The Fun Details, Little Stories, & Nerdy Details

• The first day I streamed DAY6 on Spotify was September 24, 2024, which is why I’m treating September 24 as the “anniversary,” even though it was some unknowable date earlier in September (probably a week or two before the 24th) when their music videos first showed up on our television’s auto-play function. If I remember correctly, the first videos we saw were “Congratulations,” “Welcome to the Show,” and “I Smile.”
  
• I streamed the band 50 times that first month. Most of those streams went to Band Aid, the group’s newest release at the time (released September 2, 2024). From the start, my most-streamed song was “Melt Down,” which has stood the test of time as my favorite DAY6 song.
  
• Moving on from mostly listening to Band Aid, I slowly started working through the group’s releases in reverse-chronological order, starting with their first post-hiatus release from early 2024 (Fourever), then 2021’s The Book of Us: Negentropy, which was the band’s final release before enlisting in the military. But it’s clear that I wasn’t hooked quite yet, as I spent the following two weeks barely listening to them at all.
  
• Despite almost entirely ignoring the band for the first 12 days of October 2024, the remainder of the month exploded into such an obsession that it broke a new personal record for me (at least, a record from the previous five years, as far back as my lastfm account has data to track). As displayed in the image below, I went on to stream DAY6 nearly 400 times in the month of October, surpassing the record-holding month when I streamed Weezer 378 times (February 2021). [These per-month listening records will come up again in a later bullet point.]
  
  
  
• The song data on my lastfm account makes it clear that my explosive new obsession during the month of October started as a result of three primary factors:
  1) I continued to adore Band Aid, meanwhile “Melt Down” single-handedly contributed 10% of those nearly-400 song streams;
  2) As I went backwards through the band’s discography, I encountered a very big surprise: a Japanese-language album titled Unlock, a.k.a. an attempt to crossover into the J-rock industry. By all accounts, the crossover didn’t work, and in the years since, the band has recorded very few Japanese songs. However, the album really worked for me, marrying my newfound enjoyment of DAY6 with my years-old love for Japanese rock bands. The album isn’t necessarily great on the whole, but of its ten tracks, it has three amazing singles plus two all-timer deep cuts (“Falling” and “Baby, it’s okay”); and lastly,
  3) As I completed my backwards exploration through the band’s catalog, I came to the startling discovery that their debut album, 2017’s SUNRISE, might very well be the strongest front-to-back release of their career. It was astonishingly good — an absolute revelation.
  
• That initial obsession period throughout the fall ’24 season had a huge drop-off as the year ended. By necessity, I needed to redirect my attention to my work as a critic and podcaster for the website Jesusfreakhideout, catching up on new Christian market releases so that I could finalize my top ten lists for our best albums and best songs of 2024 feature. Moving into 2025, I barely listened to the band at all from January through April; but this aligned with those four months being very light on music-listening in general. January and February ’25, while containing only ten(!) DAY6 streams, were the two lowest-activity months I’ve had in the entire 2020s decade — and by a significant margin, too. I spent so much time those two months recording and mixing my own music that I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to listen to much music by other artists.
  
• This all changed when DAY6 began gearing up for the release of two new singles in May ’25: “game over” and “Maybe Tomorrow.” These new singles re-sparked an interest in their whole discography that hasn’t gone away since, especially with how strongly my daughter connected with “Maybe Tomorrow.” Rumors of new music for the band’s upcoming tenth anniversary kept the momentum strong throughout the summer months, especially as the rumors proved true and we started seeing new songs being played live.
  
• Since May, I’ve continued streaming the group at least 200+ times per month, and I’ve broken the aforementioned October ’24 record three times: 570 streams in May ’25, 410 streams in June ’25, and then the big one. This present month (September ’25), I’ve streamed DAY6’s catalog a staggering 857 times and counting, with one week still left in the month.
  
• This crazy month of listening (which has far exceeded even my own expectations) was largely powered by the release of The DECADE, which has received 277 streams since its release less than three weeks ago, making it my second-most-streamed album of 2025 (behind cinema staff’s PLASTIC YOUTH) and my 12th most-streamed album of the 2020s (as pictured below).
  
  
  
• The rest of these bullets points largely consist of data from my lastfm account, which is about 5 years old. I sure wish I had data dating all the way back to college or even high school, but we’ll work with what we’ve got. As seen in the image above (effectively representing the 2020s), my biggest musical obsessions have been overtaken by foreign language music (Japanese and Korean, in particular). Interestingly, English-speaking music still accounts for the bulk of my streaming and the large majority of the artists I listen to; but over the past few years, the individual albums which I’ve listened to the most have trended more and more towards K-pop and J-rock. As of now, 13 of my top 25 albums are non-English. However, without DAY6, this majority would fall from one-half to only one-fourth.
  
• The two biggest albums from DAY6 and co. are clearly SUNRISE and Sungjin’s solo album 30, which are neck-and-neck for my #4 and #5 spots. However, they are a long ways away from ever reaching #3 or higher. My #2 album, Rejoice by Official HIGE Dandism, was my runaway favorite album of 2024. I figured Higedan (for short) would be the front-runner for my top artist of 2024; however, I listened to DAY6 so much within those final few months of 2024 that, by a small margin, Spotify wound up announcing DAY6 as my most-streamed artist of the year. Had I been using Apple Music, though, Higedan would’ve still taken the #1 artist spot, since Apple Music uses the metric of “minutes listened” instead of song streams. As I approach the dumbfounding stats in the following few bullet points, it’s worth keeping in mind that these staggering numbers have been made possible thanks to DAY6’s commonly shorter songs. They’ve literally never released a song over 5 minutes long in their entire career, whereas the songs on Higedan’s Rejoice average 5 minutes in length.
  
• I mentioned this next factoid in the main article above, but I want to stress that I am truly shocked that DAY6 has become my #1 artist on lastfm. It wasn’t a goal I was trying to exceed. Even if The DECADE had become my new album of the year, I didn’t think the band would be so quick to pass the 3,000 scrobble mark; and they only did so in these past few days (as I was writing this article and finalizing my “top 25” playlists). I thought cinema staff would hold on to #1 perpetually, and in total honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised if cinema staff overtook the #1 spot soon (especially considering that, on the whole, I like their new album PLASTIC YOUTH more than The DECADE). I also expect my obsessive discography binge to slow down soon (or potentially halt completely) over the coming months, similar to what happened in 2024, as my attention shifts to other new albums coming out and to my duties as a critic for Jesusfreakhideout.
  
• I hit another surprising milestone a few days. On potentially the same exact day that DAY6 crossed the 3,000 scrobble point, the numbers from all the other DAY6-related projects (the solo releases plus the side project Even of Day) hit 1,000, collectively. If we combine these numbers, we arrive at a whopping 4,000+ songs streams within a single year. It’s very possible that I’ve never had one year with one artist like this before in my entire life — or if I have, it occurred in the early days of me developing my own music tastes (circa 7th–10th grade) when I listened passionately and regularly to a relatively small stable of artists (Thrice, Mae, The Receiving End of Sirens, etc.), limited to the physical CDs that I owned. I mentioned earlier how cool it would be if my lastfm stats dated all the way back to college or high school, and if they did, I believe they would back up the following assertion: DAY6 has almost certainly entered the top ten most-listened artists of my lifetime.
  
• The exact final streaming numbers from the past year, since streaming DAY6 for the first time 365 days ago, are: DAY6 – 3,100; Even of Day – 190; Sungjin – 431; Young K – 267; Wonpil – 169; and Dowoon – 20, for a combined total of 4,177.
  
• For some per-song statistics: Each soloist/side project has at least one song with 20 listens. The top songs per artist are Even of Day – “thanks to”; Sungjin – “Check Pattern”; Young K – “nothing but”; Wonpil – “Stranded”; and Dowoon – “Out of the Blue.” The major outlier here is Sungjin, whose album 30 became a major “comfort food” album for me. Not only does his lowest-streamed song far exceed 20 listens (“Wednesday Night,” 32), but also his highest-streamed song recently hit 50 — an astonishing record that DAY6 has only accomplished with 4 songs thus far. (In the history of my lastfm account, only 38 total songs have hit 50+ scrobbles.)
  
• Moving on to DAY6’s biggest songs, I’ve mentioned multiple times that “Melt Down” is my favorite song by the band, and long before any other DAY6 song reached 50 listens, “Melt Down” had already become my 4th song ever to hit 100. It now sits at 115 total listens, but thanks in large part to my daughter’s unabashed love for it, “Maybe Tomorrow” quickly caught up to and surpassed “Melt Down.” It presently sits at 130 listens, making it my top song on lastfm and also the most-played song in the history of my Spotify account.
  
• Beyond those two anomalies, my other top DAY6 tracks sit around the 50~ mark, representing the songs which most regularly showed up on our YouTube auto-play in the early days of getting into the band: “I Wait,” “days gone by,” “Monster,” “Happy,” and “Welcome to the Show.” It’s worth mentioning here that a huge contributor to my lastfm scrobbles being so high is that I would track streams whenever we watched music videos of the band; I would even track streams when we watched live footage or when I listened to concerts in the background while working. My overall DAY6 streams would be many hundreds lower, had I not picked up this habit of tracking video-based listens very early on.
  
• After those, the overwhelming majority of the band’s discography lies within the 20-ish-to-30-ish range of streams per song. One of my craziest accomplishments from this past year, though, is that I have streamed nearly every single song in the band’s discography at least 10 times. This was accomplished largely by my common practice of listening to a playlist of all the band’s songs on shuffle, which led to even my least favorite DAY6 songs receiving a fair handful of listens. (In fact, there is only one song the band has ever released that I would quote as being outright bad: “EMERGENCY,” which still managed to amass 8 listens, usually from instances of listening to the entire Entropy album, which is great on the whole.)
  
• This whole article has been leading to the final image below: the 5×5 representation of my 25 top albums from the past 365 days, ever since I streamed DAY6 that very first time. The band and its related projects make up a massive majority, taking up 18 of the 25 spots. (Furthermore, the band makes up 20 of my top 25 albums of 2025, as of today.) Of these 18 entries, 14 belong to DAY6 specifically while an additional four come from Sungjin, Young K, Wonpil, and Even of Day. The newest albums from cinema staff and Higedan are the only entries that keep DAY6 from having a total monopoly over my top 16 spots, ranging from 400+ streams of 2017’s SUNRISE and Sungjin’s 30, down to 126 streams for the 2018 mini-album Shoot Me : Youth Part 1. (These 16 releases were the only entries in my top 25 until a few weeks ago, when two additional mini-albums snuck into the bottom spots with under 100 streams each: DAY6’s 2015 debut mini-album The Day and Even of Day’s 2021 second mini-album Right Through Me. The only missing DAY6 album is their sophomore mini-album from 2016, DAYDREAM.) It’s hard for me to wrap this up in any other way but to say that this band and its members make a whole lot of music, basically all of which is good, most of which is great, and some of which is life-changing.