The coolest thing for me now is when I'm in the States and I meet other Asian-Americans who are like, 'Dude, thank you so much for doing what you do. I love your music, I love whatever. But whatever you do, we're gonna support you because there aren't many Asian faces doing music.'

Oftentimes you're breaking out because your face is lacking moisture or hydration.

I'm active on social media because that's such a big reason why K-pop and Korean music performs the way it does.

I'm the type of person that if I feel strongly about something and if I really want to do something, I'm just gonna do it. And if it works out, amazing, and it's like 'I told you so,' but if it doesn't work out, that's fine.

Even within K-pop, there should be more representation. It's not just groups, and it's not just incredibly produced, highly choreographed pieces. There are vocalists, there's R&B, there's hip-hop, there are other types of people and voices. There's space for all of that to be shared and to be appreciated.

People around me tell me that I need a bigger persona and to act a little more A-listy because 'that's where you are but you don't act that way, so people undervalue you.' But that's not me.

I love BTS, they're my friends.

I think representation is something that's absolutely needed. I felt like with K-pop being so hot, we could leverage that to potentially do something bigger with music in the States that people could latch onto.

Being a hungry artist, you don't have the luxury of buying whatever you want. There were years of me doing a lot of odd jobs, this and that just to make ends meet.

Korean, yes, I am now fluent in Korean. I was not always. When I got to Korea, I was constantly put on TV shows not knowing what was going on. So that forced me to learn Korean so I could stop looking like an idiot.

So Mandarin, I picked it up, I spent a year in Beijing studying but then when you don't use it, languages, you just kinda forget it all.

I don't know why I feel the need to try and do everything. But I kind of have this mentality that you live once, and I have a lot of things that I want to do and there's a lot of things that I want to try. So I have to at least give it a shot before I don't try at all or like, give up on things.

I learned Spanish as my second language from middle school through high school. I grew up volunteering at homeless shelters and tutoring kids of Latin immigrants in Atlanta, who didn't speak any English. That prepared me for when I traveled.

There was a point when dancing to music became cheesy after the boy band era of NSync and Backstreet Boys, but there were always those who craved that kind of visual satisfaction. K-Pop really filled that void, because it's so geared to spectacle.

I had accepted a position as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting in New York. But before I went into that workforce, I decided to take a year off and went to India to do a social enterprise fellowship. It wasn't the best fit, but that was where a TV show in Korea found me and invited me to first come perform.

For the first four or five years I was in Korea, I took a lot of direction from my management and label in terms of what people want. I found myself trying to fit into that thing I never felt comfortable with because the critique I got was that I was too American, and too sophisticated and polished in terms of my musicality and it won't sell.

Coming to Korea and becoming a singer, I always had two big goals personally. One was to be able to make it at some point so that I could do good things - I was always raised with an interest in social impact, philanthropy. The other thing was to be able to take my music and do it on a global scale.

From a strictly business perspective, it's like, 'Even if you leave Eric alone, he'll do stuff. He puts his own album together, he gets his own gigs, he does everything on TV. Let him be, he's fine.'

I'm just looking for that one song that I know everybody's going to be like, 'Damn, that's a good song.'

I was born and raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, which as you can imagine, was not the most diverse place to grow up in as a Korean American.

Typically in Korea when I perform I have a full band, a ten-piece band, and that's a completely different monster in itself to prepare and rehearse.

No matter what you do, you should enjoy it. You should really find passion in it.

In a way, I'm overly ambitious, selfish in a way. I think because I am so active, I think that's what keeps my brain going and I can bounce things off of each other.

It's so wild to be able to say that I can do shows in front of thousands of people and have them sing my songs in Korean and in English - that is wild to me.