David Choi American Singer From Garden Grove

Early life

David Choi is an American singer-songwriter and producer, born on 22 March 1986 in California. He is of Korean descent and grew up in a musical household: his parents run a small music shop, and his father plays the autoharp. As a child he was made to study piano and violin, lessons he did not particularly enjoy, although he rose to become concertmaster of his school orchestra. He first heard mainstream pop music in sixth grade, and songs by Smash Mouth and blink-182 prompted him to try playing on the guitar. Soon he was listening to boy bands and Japanese pop, taping songs from the radio and assembling his own mix tapes. He wrote his first instrumental piece, "Lost Memory", on the piano. In high school he gave up violin lessons and started jazz piano in ninth grade, began composing seriously, and won his first accolade with an instrumental pop song entered in a contest.

Career

Choi recorded his early compositions on a computer using music software that he taught himself to use. In 2005 he won the grand prize in a mashup contest in which David Bowie chose the winner, and he also took the top prize for teenagers in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest. These successes, together with a songwriting workshop run by ASCAP, led to a contract with Warner/Chappell Music as a staff songwriter and producer. He later left the publisher so that he could release an album of his own on an independent basis.

His breakthrough came on 30 December 2006, when he uploaded the humorous track "YouTube (A Love Song)". The video was featured on the homepage of the video site, and it brought him requests for new songs, live shows and an album. His first album, Only You, followed in October 2008 and was made up mostly of love songs, among them "Won't Even Start", which became his best-known single. A Korean special edition with bonus tracks was issued in 2009. His second album, By My Side, came out in May 2010, with a music video for its lead single "That Girl". Both videos were made in collaboration with the production company Wong Fu Productions, which often used his music in its own work. His third album, Forever and Ever, was released on 25 October 2011, and the fourth, Stories of You's and Me, arrived in 2015. A Christmas album followed in 2016.

Choi has toured widely. His first tour, in November 2009, covered cities on the American West Coast and Vancouver, and later tours took him to the East Coast, Canada, Southeast Asia, Australia, Korea and Japan. He has described his music as pop with a hint of jazz and folk, and his songs are mostly slow and centred on love and relationships. An instrumental version of his song "I Choose Happiness" was chosen for the 2011 film Lucky.

Alongside music, he is the founder of the independent music company Chois Music, which manages catalogues for clients. In 2020 he co-founded Takko, a platform for video chat that is not held in real time, and the company was acquired in 2023. He is also a member of the parody K-pop group BgA, based in Los Angeles. In September 2021 his main YouTube channel had 949,000 subscribers, and by late 2011 he had ranked among the platform's most-subscribed musicians.

Recognition

Choi's early honours were contest prizes: the grand prize in the Bowie mashup contest and the John Lennon Songwriting Contest prize, both in 2005. His commercial partners have included Kellogg's, the American Cancer Society, General Electric, Samsung and J. C. Penney.