I'm not sure how many people remember, but back in 2007 when 30 Minutes Night Flight was released, Maaya released 'Chizu to tegami to koi no uta' (Maps, Letters and Love Songs) which was a collection of song lyrics, photos and two small pieces of writing. It was a really nice collection, beautiful photos, drawings by Maaya, and, of course, the lyrics themselves.
This is the ending of the book. After 'Poketto wo kara ni shite' (Empty the Pocket) which as we know, is a song about heading off on a journey. It's also the song Maaya ends her concerts with. It's a nice little letter from Finland, which is where they shot the photos for 30 Minutes Night Flight. Really sweet.
Enjoy!!
Maps, Letters and Love Songs: A letter from my travels
Published 2007.
It’s around an eight hour flight to get from Japan to the capital of Finland, Helsinki. It’s surprisingly close.
Even though it’s October, every day is hot and humid thanks to the strange weather we’ve been having; in one step I left the lingering summer heat of Tokyo for a Europe of falling autumnal leaves. The avenue of Gingko trees in front of the hotel is full of the scent of gingko nuts.
The four days I stayed here were packed with photo shoots. Blessed with perfect weather they all went according to plan; I’m sure we took a lot of great photos.
In forests, by lakes, inside elementary schools, railway stations, on top of a hill with a red barn, sitting in cafes and sailing on boats – we took photos in a lot of different places, but the spot I liked best on this trip was Helsinki Cathedral.
A white building which soars above the centre of town, when you start to climb the stairs, you realise that it’s actually on a slope and that it's a lot bigger than it looks from below. When I finally reached the top and turned around, I couldn’t believe the scenery that was stretching out before my eyes. All of the rooftops lined up beneath me and beyond lay the harbour, the marketplace and the ferries that travel off to foreign lands. Then there were the cute green trams running up and down the streets. As I turned to survey the land below, the sun suddenly shone down, after being hidden within thick clouds all day.
Sitting down on the steps and watching the sun until it set completely wasn’t a bit boring. The wind was freezing so it was quite cold, but I think I could have sat there for hours and hours. The locals said, “You should see the cathedral once, but it’s not that interesting.” But if I lived in this place, I would sit here and watch the sky and the town every morning, noon and night. I wonder if they don’t realise how wonderful it is because they’re used to living here. There’s a chance that perhaps that I am also overlooking some wonderful place in the town I live, thinking it’s simply commonplace.
As for food in Finland, the local delicacy is reindeer. Yesterday I ate dinner in a traditional Finnish restaurant, it was there that I encountered reindeer meat. It seems like it’s a really popular restaurant, and you need to have a reservation to go there. I was kind of surprised that reindeer has a pretty characteristic smell, but it was tenderer than I thought it was going to be. Apart from reindeer, there’s Lapland Cheese, which tastes a lot like tofu, and really meaty salmon, make up the local menu.
By the by, apparently Finland has the largest number of coffee drinkers in the world. You’re surprised, right? Now, this is just between you and me, but no matter which shop I went to, all the coffee I drank was strangely weak in flavour. But in order to be the biggest coffee drinking country in the world, just how many cups a day are these people drinking? Anyway, when this self-confessed coffee addict gets back to Japan, the first thing she wants to do is to drink a strong cup of coffee.
Something really surprising happened today: I found my own CD displayed in a shop window here in Helsinki!
There, in some shop on a street I was casually walking down, was ‘Hotchpotch’ selling for 18.90 Euros. To think that my songs have crossed the sea to this place, before I’ve even set foot on this land! That people with a language so unlike Japanese, living with scenery so completely different, eating food tasting nothing like that in Japan, are listening to my music. I felt overcome with emotion, happy, when I thought that we must have something in common. I had no idea that the last day of my trip would hold this kind of emotion for me.
Tomorrow afternoon I will be flying back to Japan.
Whether it’s for work or pleasure, I love travelling. This trip to Finland also turned out to be a great success.
But it’s really weird, on the morning of my departure I always feel nervous before travelling, and this time it was the same. I feel like I’ve forgotten something, like I don’t want to go on the trip anymore. No matter how much I’ve been looking forward to setting off beforehand, I always get like this.
I think about the faces of my family and friends; deciding in my heart that as soon as I return home I will meet up with them, and we’ll take our time over a delicious meal. I’ll buy them a souvenir, I’ll send them a post card. I begin to miss those people who I had always thought of as those I could meet ‘anytime I like’.
As I fasten my seatbelt, there’s no going back from this road I have chosen to walk down. It is when we take off, that moment when I must entrust myself to that repulsion of gravity, that I understand the reason why I am going on this trip: it is because I have somewhere to return to that a journey is truly a journey. It is because I have people waiting for me that I return.
It is to you, the one who is waiting for me, that I send this letter to from a faraway country.
From Maaya Sakamoto. Helsinki.
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
CDJournal April 2010 'everywhere' Interview
A new interview translation taken from CDJournal April 2010 during the 'everywhere' promotional run. Quite a nice piece. Enjoy! Oh, and Merry Christmas everyone!!
Note: went back to Japanese titles for songs/albums.
CDJournal 2010 April
Original text by Atsuko Takaki
The first awakening, the song that shows me as I was then: ‘I.D.’
This year Maaya Sakamoto passed her 15th year in the music business. We no longer have to say: don’t underestimate her because she’s a voice actor. She has proven through her career that her songs wouldn’t exist without that distinctive voice and those characteristic lyrics. Her thirty track best of album ‘Everywhere’ was released on the 31st of March, the day of her 30th birthday. When listening to all these ‘standard’ Maaya songs, more than just a sense of nostalgia, there’s a cohesiveness that comes from being cut from the same cloth. Transcending time, they burst into existence with their magnitude. You can truly get a sense of the singer Maaya Sakamoto’s talent. Within all this comes the opening track, ‘I.D.’ (from her 1998 album ‘DIVE’.) Sitting in a small café after the cover shoot, she told us about her relationship with this song while drinking milk tea.
“In many ways, I think ‘DIVE’ was what you might call my first awakening, a realisation, I suppose. And from all that was going on, I think ‘I.D’ captures who I was at the time. When I read the lyrics again now, of course there’s a lack of experience that comes through in many places, but I think for an eighteen year old I really had something (laugh.) At the time, when I wanted someone to understand all these pent-up feelings I had, I thought that singing would get it across better than simply saying it. That’s why I think I was saved through writing lyrics. The ‘who am I?’ in the song, the longing of a small self to feel connected with something larger like the sky and the universe; I wasn’t really conscious of it but [after re-reading the lyrics] I realised again that these are the themes I still sing about now.”
The best album also contains her debut ‘Yakusoku wa iranai’ (1996), however “it’s strange but even though the vocal quality and way of singing are different to now, I really don’t think it’s aged at all. It’s a song that’s always been close to me.” For Sakamoto, who has used singing to face herself since her debut, each song has a place within her. Which is why pain and doubt are plain to see within some of her songs. For example, ‘Hikari Are’ (from 2003’s ‘Shonen Alice’) is a song that is unusual for her in that it is full to bursting point with violent determination.
“Around that time, various truths that I thought I understood completely were shattered; I felt like I had completely slid back to point zero. But so much time had passed since my debut that I thought I was no longer allowed to let outsiders see this kind of unease. So in ‘Hikari Are’ I’m yelling as hard as I can to put on a brave front. Because I was doing that, it kind of became a sort of rock song, but at the bottom of it all there’s a feeling of ‘what the hell am I supposed to be doing?’ In the song I sing: ‘someday once again I’ll show you I can walk again’. I wasn’t able to sing anything other than ‘someday’ then. But, despite that I wrote the lyrics thinking: if this despairing voice can reach somewhere out there then…”
Not only ‘Hikari Are’, but many of Sakamoto’s most famous songs were produced by Yoko Kanno. Her presence is not one that can be left out when going through Sakamoto’s discography, but her own first impression of Kanno at fifteen was “the person who brought cake to the studio (laugh)”. Since then, they’ve worked together, although “it’s not a relationship of teacher and student, or that of being in a group…it’s more like she’s my older sister.” Eventually, the degree of difficulty set by Kanno’s songs increased, and Sakamoto could no longer easily belt out a number without thinking. One could probably say this was the adolescent period of Maaya Sakamoto the singer.
“I really like it when the hurdles get higher. If they don’t then what’s the point? It’s more fun if you can jump higher and higher, rather than just staying the same. Even now I can remember that ‘Hemisphere’ (released in 2002) was a really difficult song, the lyrics had quite an impact, and I really struggled with the best way to interpret them. I sang it over and over again when we were recording it, but somehow my feelings just didn’t fit the song. But when I listen to it now, I can interpret the lyrics in my own way, and I feel like I really understand the meaning of what Ms. Kanno wanted me to sing back then. Recently I’ve really discovered how great this song actually is.”
‘Hemisphere’ is a best seller, and was the title song of an animation series that Sakamoto appeared in as a voice actor, ‘Raxephon’. For Sakamoto who has a long history with anime songs, was there any effect while she was awakening as a singer on her ‘I.D. = identity’ as a vocalist caused by the gap between anime and original songs?
“In the beginning, I pretty much went with it because singing lots of different songs was fun, but there came a point when I felt that ‘Maaya Sakamoto songs’ and the songs created for an anime were different. That’s why they were released in ‘Single Collections’ originally, but I thought that it was somehow really sad to separate them out from everything else like that. If possible, I wanted them to exist in harmony. So I started to think about ways that they could be brought together, and I feel that recently they’ve finally been able to merge successfully.”
Being able to make use of my experiences and failures: looking forward to my thirties.
After her honeymoon period with Yoko Kanno, Sakamoto has recently sung songs written for her by the likes of Shoko Suzuki, Michiko Takada and Kaori Kano, who she felt “like I had known them for a long time, despite it being the first time we had met.” Removing the fence between anime and original songs, Sakamoto’s consciousness as a singer also began to change.
“Until now, even though I haven’t written any songs myself, I’d felt a bit daunted by the prospect of only being able to express myself through singing. But recently I’ve begun to take pride in being able to use that form of expression; my voice is unique in tone, it’s an instrument. I used to be satisfied with only brushing the surface of the world view enclosed within a particular song, but that’s now expanded to ‘how do I want to express this?’ I know inside exactly how I want to sing a song, and I want to be able to draw that out, into my performance.”
From that, the last song on the best album, the new song ‘everywhere’ was born. Sakamoto both composed the song and wrote the lyrics. You would think that she would be satisfied with this, but truth be told, it seems as if it’s a song that “feels like I just winged it.”
“Last year I took a holiday and spent a month travelling around Europe by myself. During the trip I stayed in an inn in the Italian countryside which had a piano. To be honest, I only touched a piano for the first time about two years ago. But when I was playing, a melody just floated into my head. While I was travelling, of course there weren’t any pianos, but I didn’t really listen to music either, but when I touched the piano in that inn, a melody and lyrics just popped into my head. The song was born really naturally.”
Guided by piano, the melody gently building, this beautiful ballad begins with the lyrics: ‘the place I’m headed towards isn’t so far away’. For Sakamoto, who has “always thought that the place I was meant to be in wasn’t here, but somewhere else,” has begun to reflect that “recently it’s been the opposite: wherever you go, that place can be made into the one you belong, you just have to start by loving what’s there within your own two hands.” With this change of heart, surely the scenery on her journey will change from now on.
“I’m turning thirty next, and I’m actually really looking forward to my thirties. I feel like I can finally make use of all the experiences I’ve gained up until now. There was so much going on during my twenties, it was really interesting, but I also had a lot of failures. I think that I was able to meet a lot of different types of people, and build lots of foundations. I think I’ve finally been able to chew it up, swallow it all down, and now I’ll be able to turn it into energy that I can send out. More than ‘I’m going to do something new’, it’s that I’ve spread my roots and finally got a foundation to settle down on. I’d really like to put those roots down deeper and more securely now.”
One could say that the song ‘everywhere’ is fruit which has blossomed on the tree grown on that solid foundation. For the last question, when asked about the impression Sakamoto has of her own voice, she replied: “I like the way it feels like a sponge, with lots of gaps for airflow.” ‘Wind’ is a key word for Sakamoto, and there’s no doubt that a comfortable breeze will continue to blow through her songs. And now, guided by that wind the season of the harvest has just begun.
Fin
Note: went back to Japanese titles for songs/albums.
CDJournal 2010 April
Original text by Atsuko Takaki
The first awakening, the song that shows me as I was then: ‘I.D.’
This year Maaya Sakamoto passed her 15th year in the music business. We no longer have to say: don’t underestimate her because she’s a voice actor. She has proven through her career that her songs wouldn’t exist without that distinctive voice and those characteristic lyrics. Her thirty track best of album ‘Everywhere’ was released on the 31st of March, the day of her 30th birthday. When listening to all these ‘standard’ Maaya songs, more than just a sense of nostalgia, there’s a cohesiveness that comes from being cut from the same cloth. Transcending time, they burst into existence with their magnitude. You can truly get a sense of the singer Maaya Sakamoto’s talent. Within all this comes the opening track, ‘I.D.’ (from her 1998 album ‘DIVE’.) Sitting in a small café after the cover shoot, she told us about her relationship with this song while drinking milk tea.
“In many ways, I think ‘DIVE’ was what you might call my first awakening, a realisation, I suppose. And from all that was going on, I think ‘I.D’ captures who I was at the time. When I read the lyrics again now, of course there’s a lack of experience that comes through in many places, but I think for an eighteen year old I really had something (laugh.) At the time, when I wanted someone to understand all these pent-up feelings I had, I thought that singing would get it across better than simply saying it. That’s why I think I was saved through writing lyrics. The ‘who am I?’ in the song, the longing of a small self to feel connected with something larger like the sky and the universe; I wasn’t really conscious of it but [after re-reading the lyrics] I realised again that these are the themes I still sing about now.”
The best album also contains her debut ‘Yakusoku wa iranai’ (1996), however “it’s strange but even though the vocal quality and way of singing are different to now, I really don’t think it’s aged at all. It’s a song that’s always been close to me.” For Sakamoto, who has used singing to face herself since her debut, each song has a place within her. Which is why pain and doubt are plain to see within some of her songs. For example, ‘Hikari Are’ (from 2003’s ‘Shonen Alice’) is a song that is unusual for her in that it is full to bursting point with violent determination.
“Around that time, various truths that I thought I understood completely were shattered; I felt like I had completely slid back to point zero. But so much time had passed since my debut that I thought I was no longer allowed to let outsiders see this kind of unease. So in ‘Hikari Are’ I’m yelling as hard as I can to put on a brave front. Because I was doing that, it kind of became a sort of rock song, but at the bottom of it all there’s a feeling of ‘what the hell am I supposed to be doing?’ In the song I sing: ‘someday once again I’ll show you I can walk again’. I wasn’t able to sing anything other than ‘someday’ then. But, despite that I wrote the lyrics thinking: if this despairing voice can reach somewhere out there then…”
Not only ‘Hikari Are’, but many of Sakamoto’s most famous songs were produced by Yoko Kanno. Her presence is not one that can be left out when going through Sakamoto’s discography, but her own first impression of Kanno at fifteen was “the person who brought cake to the studio (laugh)”. Since then, they’ve worked together, although “it’s not a relationship of teacher and student, or that of being in a group…it’s more like she’s my older sister.” Eventually, the degree of difficulty set by Kanno’s songs increased, and Sakamoto could no longer easily belt out a number without thinking. One could probably say this was the adolescent period of Maaya Sakamoto the singer.
“I really like it when the hurdles get higher. If they don’t then what’s the point? It’s more fun if you can jump higher and higher, rather than just staying the same. Even now I can remember that ‘Hemisphere’ (released in 2002) was a really difficult song, the lyrics had quite an impact, and I really struggled with the best way to interpret them. I sang it over and over again when we were recording it, but somehow my feelings just didn’t fit the song. But when I listen to it now, I can interpret the lyrics in my own way, and I feel like I really understand the meaning of what Ms. Kanno wanted me to sing back then. Recently I’ve really discovered how great this song actually is.”
‘Hemisphere’ is a best seller, and was the title song of an animation series that Sakamoto appeared in as a voice actor, ‘Raxephon’. For Sakamoto who has a long history with anime songs, was there any effect while she was awakening as a singer on her ‘I.D. = identity’ as a vocalist caused by the gap between anime and original songs?
“In the beginning, I pretty much went with it because singing lots of different songs was fun, but there came a point when I felt that ‘Maaya Sakamoto songs’ and the songs created for an anime were different. That’s why they were released in ‘Single Collections’ originally, but I thought that it was somehow really sad to separate them out from everything else like that. If possible, I wanted them to exist in harmony. So I started to think about ways that they could be brought together, and I feel that recently they’ve finally been able to merge successfully.”
Being able to make use of my experiences and failures: looking forward to my thirties.
After her honeymoon period with Yoko Kanno, Sakamoto has recently sung songs written for her by the likes of Shoko Suzuki, Michiko Takada and Kaori Kano, who she felt “like I had known them for a long time, despite it being the first time we had met.” Removing the fence between anime and original songs, Sakamoto’s consciousness as a singer also began to change.
“Until now, even though I haven’t written any songs myself, I’d felt a bit daunted by the prospect of only being able to express myself through singing. But recently I’ve begun to take pride in being able to use that form of expression; my voice is unique in tone, it’s an instrument. I used to be satisfied with only brushing the surface of the world view enclosed within a particular song, but that’s now expanded to ‘how do I want to express this?’ I know inside exactly how I want to sing a song, and I want to be able to draw that out, into my performance.”
From that, the last song on the best album, the new song ‘everywhere’ was born. Sakamoto both composed the song and wrote the lyrics. You would think that she would be satisfied with this, but truth be told, it seems as if it’s a song that “feels like I just winged it.”
“Last year I took a holiday and spent a month travelling around Europe by myself. During the trip I stayed in an inn in the Italian countryside which had a piano. To be honest, I only touched a piano for the first time about two years ago. But when I was playing, a melody just floated into my head. While I was travelling, of course there weren’t any pianos, but I didn’t really listen to music either, but when I touched the piano in that inn, a melody and lyrics just popped into my head. The song was born really naturally.”
Guided by piano, the melody gently building, this beautiful ballad begins with the lyrics: ‘the place I’m headed towards isn’t so far away’. For Sakamoto, who has “always thought that the place I was meant to be in wasn’t here, but somewhere else,” has begun to reflect that “recently it’s been the opposite: wherever you go, that place can be made into the one you belong, you just have to start by loving what’s there within your own two hands.” With this change of heart, surely the scenery on her journey will change from now on.
“I’m turning thirty next, and I’m actually really looking forward to my thirties. I feel like I can finally make use of all the experiences I’ve gained up until now. There was so much going on during my twenties, it was really interesting, but I also had a lot of failures. I think that I was able to meet a lot of different types of people, and build lots of foundations. I think I’ve finally been able to chew it up, swallow it all down, and now I’ll be able to turn it into energy that I can send out. More than ‘I’m going to do something new’, it’s that I’ve spread my roots and finally got a foundation to settle down on. I’d really like to put those roots down deeper and more securely now.”
One could say that the song ‘everywhere’ is fruit which has blossomed on the tree grown on that solid foundation. For the last question, when asked about the impression Sakamoto has of her own voice, she replied: “I like the way it feels like a sponge, with lots of gaps for airflow.” ‘Wind’ is a key word for Sakamoto, and there’s no doubt that a comfortable breeze will continue to blow through her songs. And now, guided by that wind the season of the harvest has just begun.
Fin
Friday, 17 December 2010
New PV released!
New PV for 'Himitsu' from Maaya's album 'You Can't Catch Me' was released on Youtube by Flying Dog! I really like it...and the production is outstanding this time!
Monday, 6 December 2010
New album previews up!
I'm excited: Maaya's official site has psoted up previews to ALL of the new songs from her album!
Go listen now.
Go listen now.
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