Minhye J Wrote My Dear Ocean for Anyone Leaving Home, and Listeners Made It Her Top Song
5 min read
Minhye J Wrote My Dear Ocean for Anyone Leaving Home, and Listeners Made It Her Top Song
The South Korean Singer-Songwriter’s Soft Rock Single Speaks to Listeners Recovering From Long Depression
My Dear Ocean sits first among the songs of Minhye J on Spotify, with 15,845 plays by 15 November 2026. The singer-songwriter from Seoul, South Korea, released the soft rock single on 18 November 2025, almost a year earlier.
Minhye J’s music sits in the playlist below, and her coverage is collected on her artist profile. My Dear Ocean came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Press play, then read on.
What moved it there is who it speaks to. The song reaches out to people about to leave the safety of home, and to anyone climbing out of a long depression. So this piece starts with those listeners and then reads the first year of numbers. Last, it places the song in the Korean indie community around it.
Minhye J Wrote My Dear Ocean for Listeners Leaving Home After Years of Depression
The song is a decision set to music. It is a deeply personal piece about independence: stepping out alone into a harsh world after overcoming long-term depression and leaving the safety of a parent’s care.
Its Korean lyrics open by addressing someone as wide and blue as the sea. Then the narrator leaves a garden in bloom behind and sets off into a world of big, rough waves, with her worries left at the door.
A soft but strong acoustic guitar carries the song from the first bar to the last, across four minutes and one second. That keeps the words at the front. The mood is bittersweet rather than sad. A listener abroad may need a translation for the words, but not for the guitar or for the shape of the song.
That makes the audience easy to name. It is anyone packing for a first flat, a first job in another city or a first life alone. It is also anyone for whom getting out of bed was once the hardest step of the day.
A Year of Listening Put My Dear Ocean at the Top of Her Spotify Page
The first year shows that those listeners found it. On the same day, her Spotify page counted 729 monthly listeners, and Spotify has verified her as an artist. The gap inside her own catalogue is wide, too: You and I, second in her popular list, had 2,250 plays.
The song also fits the rest of her work. Minhye J has been releasing music since 2020, and her songs are rooted in R&B, with alternative pop and rock around them. She wrote the words and the music of My Dear Ocean herself, and YEONSOO arranged it.
Yerin Baek and JANNABI Built the Korean Indie Audience That My Dear Ocean by Minhye J Speaks To
Those listeners belong to a larger community, and two acts show its shape. Yerin Baek left JYP Entertainment in 2019 and founded her own label, Blue Vinyl. The next month she released Every Letter I Sent You, a double album with 17 of its 18 songs written in English. She writes most of her own songs, often about personal topics and real-life experiences. Since 2018 she has also fronted the rock band The Volunteers as singer and guitarist. In her career, too, the line between Korean singer-songwriter music and rock is thin.
Her move showed that Korean listeners will follow a singer-songwriter out of the big-agency system. An independent artist singing about leaving home speaks to exactly that crowd.
JANNABI Shows How Far Korean Songs About Growing Up Can Travel
JANNABI showed how large the audience can grow. The band formed in 2012 on the independent label Peponi Music, and its songs keep returning to love, childhood, youth and growth. In 2019 For Lovers Who Hesitate, the lead single from the album Legend, topped South Korea’s Circle Digital Chart. It sold 2.5 million digital copies. The Korea Music Content Association later certified it triple platinum for streaming.
Growing up and leaving home are the subjects JANNABI shares with My Dear Ocean, and both are sung in Korean. So the song sits among listeners who want Korean-language songs about growing up, told plainly and with an acoustic guitar close by.
From the BestMusic.News curator team: “We added My Dear Ocean to our rock, alternative rock and indie playlist because soft rock this personal deserves a place next to the louder records.”
Play it on the day you leave somewhere, then play it again once you have arrived.
Stream My Dear Ocean on Spotify, and watch the official video for LET’S LOVE! on YouTube. Follow Minhye J on Spotify, Instagram and YouTube Music, and find her catalogue on Apple Music and Deezer.
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