Brian Reveals a Younger Artist Ignored Him Backstage Despite Hearing His Name Called

Brian, the veteran R&B singer known as one half of Fly to the Sky, sat down with singer Seo In-young for her YouTube channel last week and ended up covering a fair amount of ground: a backstage snub by a junior artist, his resistance to the romance of cohabitation, and a fortune teller in Los Angeles who told him he would spend his life without a partner or children.

The backstage story is the kind of thing veterans in the Korean entertainment industry tend to swap among themselves. Brian said he attended a concert last year and was photographed backstage when a younger artist caught his eye and simply stared, offering no greeting. What made it harder to brush off, he noted, was that other people nearby called out his name loudly enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear. The junior artist gave no response.

Seo In-young, listening to the account, offered a candid admission of her own: she said she had been equally poor-mannered in her earlier years and found herself mentally reviewing her own past while Brian talked. Brian, for his part, pointed out that among the members of Jewelry (the girl group Seo In-young belonged to in the early 2000s), she had been the least courteous of the bunch. Seo In-young laughed and agreed without hesitation.

The second half of the conversation moved toward Brian's views on relationships and living arrangements, which he laid out with the same directness. He said he had once heard that loving a spouse means accepting everything about them, including the less pleasant physical realities of shared life, and that the idea struck him as an overreach. His position was that tolerance and love are separate things: you can give someone space without being required to romanticize inconvenience.

On the question of sharing a bedroom, Brian told Seo In-young he needs his own space and finds the idea of someone physically close while he sleeps difficult to accept. The television drama image of a couple greeting each other with a kiss the moment they wake up is not one he can picture for himself. Seo In-young's response was that he simply should live alone. Brian nodded and said, essentially, yes.

He traced some of that comfort with solitude back to a visit he made years ago to a well-known saju reader (a practitioner of traditional Korean fortune-telling based on birth date and time) in Los Angeles. The reader told him to live joyfully and to enjoy his life. Brian said he initially assumed this was a polite way of saying he would not live long. The reader clarified: the reading pointed to a life without children and without a long-term partner by his side.

Rather than finding the reading unsettling, Brian said he felt relieved. It gave him a framework for understanding his own preferences as something other than a personal failing, and he has since settled into the idea of living on his own terms.

Seo In-young added that she prefers separate bathrooms in any shared living situation, and the two ended the segment trading notes on what private space actually means to each of them. It was a straightforward conversation between two performers who have been in the industry long enough to say what they actually think.