Jae Jin was never supposed to make it to 42. Diagnosed at 17 with a rare terminal illness and given two months to live, the Seoul-born, Virginia-based singer-songwriter has survived experimental chemotherapy twice in five years. At 30, believing his time was short, he walked away from a path toward an MD/MBA to pursue music full-time. Today he is a two-time survivor, and his fifth album, Praying With Eyes Open, arrived November 6, his birthday.
The album was preceded by two singles with music videos: the luminous “Through The Waves” and the playful, upbeat “Crayons.” Jin calls “Through The Waves,” the album’s opening track, “a peaceful acoustic-driven song that I wrote about my own struggle with and through my own faith journey.” It’s about remembering, in dark times, what he believed in the light. Cellist Matt Butler, who also tours with Maren Morris and Kirk Franklin, glides over simple acoustic guitars, while slide guitar drifts through the background.
Jae Jin co-produced the album with his friend and longtime mentee Aaron Hayes, who played guitars, bass, drums, piano and percussion, arranged strings, sang backing vocals, and engineered, mixed and mastered the record.
The project was funded by Jin’s fans through his first Kickstarter campaign since his 2015 debut. With an all-or-nothing goal of $20,000, he said he was uneasy about reaching it, but supporters met the goal within two days and went on to surpass it. Kickstarter gave the campaign its “Projects We Love” badge. Jin recorded the album with Hayes in Nashville over the summer of 2026, with every note played by real musicians on vintage microphones and analog gear.
That approach was deliberate. “Amidst all the craziness of AI and lack of authenticity in music, the underlying idea behind this album musically was to once again create a body of work that would be timeless and made completely by human beings,” Jin says. He adds that he has never used samples, beats or fake instruments on any of his albums.
Lyrically, the record circles one theme: time, “the one common denominator that none of us can buy more of.” On “Crayons,” even the broken ones “still color the same.” “All Creation Groans” was written for his wife after she lost her father. “Walking Each Other Home” honors his late friend Daniel, who died of cancer before Jin could play the song for him. “Bittersweet” came straight from his journal. “As someone that somehow made it to 42, I wanted to write from an honest place of how with every challenge and thorn, there is also a blessing,” he says. “Life truly is bittersweet.”
