Meet The Woman Behind Some Of BTS’ Most Popular Tracks, Including “Boy With Luv”
The latest episode of Saturday Night Live was a historic moment for BTS, but also for American songwriter Melanie Fontana.
Melanie Fontana was one of the backup singers for BTS during their historic performance. However, that wasn’t her only contribution. Melanie was one of the songwriters responsible for BTS’ “Boy With Luv”, one of the song BTS performed on the show.
Fontana’s resume is impressive in its own right. She has written songs for not only for U.S. superstars like Britney Spears and Justin Bieber, but also K-Pop legends Girl’s Generation.
The breakthrough for her could have been her work on BTS Jungkook‘s solo song, “Euphoria”, which was the lead song on BTS’ album, Love Yourself: Answer.
For Map Of The Soul: Persona, Fontana is credited with both “Boy With Luv”, and “Mikrokosmos”, an “airy, twinkling anthem that compares loved ones to stars in the galaxy”.
Fontana spoke on what made “Boy With Luv” so special in an interview with Refinery29.
It’s intelligent pop music. I feel like [BTS] were very concerned with the instrumentation, and that everything flowed together and it wasn’t just mumbo jumbo. It’s definitely within some of the strange vocal production they use in the beginning — that ‘Ooah, ooah, ooah, ooah, ahh.’ There’s just a lot of stuff on the radio that doesn’t have too much thought put into it, but they put a lot of thought into this — even before anyone started composing it. Halsey’s addition is what I like to call a ‘subtle collaboration,’ because it’s not about separating out a featured artist. It’s more like, ‘Check out Halsey with us, we’re a family, here’s her beautiful voice.’
— Melanie Fontana
She shared that it was a dream come true to finally connect with the members of BTS.
Frankly, so far it’s the most incredible thing that’s happened to me in my entire career…If the Queen knighted me, it would be less of an honor than being onstage with BTS.
Fontana is also credited with writing for TXT‘s “Crown”, and Everglow‘s “Bon Bon Chocolat”–both which were huge debut songs that took the Korean charts by storm.
