South Korean artist GAHO is laughing when he says this to me, but the image sticks. He is talking about the new music he has been making – the demos he cannot wait to play for people, the songs he has already taken on the road before they are officially out.

When we meet in Korea for a one-hour conversation, GAHO is in a particularly unfiltered mood. The singer-songwriter has spent much of the past few years occupying different musical worlds at once: delivering massive, emotionally charged OST hits including “Start Over,” building out the meticulous detail of his solo work, and finding a louder, more instinctive version of himself as the frontman of the rock band KAVE. He describes the difference simply. Solo GAHO is an intricate dish; KAVE is ramen. “Very in your face,” he says. “Instinctive. Intuitive.”

That directness runs through our conversation. GAHO speaks frankly about the Korean education system, the pressure he felt growing up within it, and the kind of teacher he imagines he might have been: one who could make school feel warmer, more communal, more alive. He talks about the responsibility behind his oft-repeated “do whatever you want” philosophy, too. Freedom, in his view, is not a throwaway idea. If you want something, you have to actually go and do it.

It is a perspective that has become especially urgent as he enters a new chapter. Last year, GAHO left the company he debuted under; now, he has co-founded PLAN-G, with the European tour serving as one of its first major schedules. The change has given him a greater sense of control over the music, ideas and conversations he wants to put into the world – even as it brings the pressure of knowing that, if things fall apart, they fall apart with him. He seems unusually at peace with the risk. “If it goes down, I go down,” he says. “So be it.”

For an artist who has sometimes been presented through a single song, a single genre or a single version of Korean pop, this feels like the point: GAHO is not trying to become easier to define.