30 Minutes Night Flight Interview - April 2007

I was on my year abroad in Japan when '30 Minutes Night Flight' came out, thus, it's my soundtrack for my year abroad photos and memories. 'Bokutachi ha koi wo suru riyuu' was the song I listened to every night I pedaled my bicycle back from my job as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. Yes, I know a) dangerous to listen to music when riding a bike along busy roads and b) what was I doing working in a Chinese restaurant in Japan? Anyway, I was able to get a lot of the magazines Maaya was featured in when she was doing her publicity for the album.

So here's a short article from Tsutaya's (the rental people) free music magazine that I picked up back in april 2007.

Maaya Sakamoto – The new album has arrived after a break of a year and 5 months. A concept album one can enjoy wholeheartedly.

Originally published in VA the magazine from Tsutaya Records vol.58, April 2007.
Interview and Text: Kana Yoshida
Translation: Pippa

If you could spend 30 minutes doing whatever you wanted, what would you do? Cook, read a book, watch a film, go outside for a bit but 30 minutes isn’t much of anything really. If you have time to spare, spend it on Maaya Sakamoto’s new album ’30 minutes night flight’. Just like it says on the box, this album lasts just 30 minutes.

M: “30 minutes isn’t a serious amount of time at all, is it? (laugh) But if it’s through music, I really think that in just 30 minutes you can travel the entire globe or even go into space.”

When you hear the words ‘concept album’, whether it’s an ‘acoustic album’ or a ‘ballad album’, usually one can get a sense of the whole product even before listening to it. However, with this album, each song has a completely different feel from the one before it and this really makes you anticipate the track that will come next.

M: “This album really isn’t from a single person’s perspective, it’s singing about the lives of many different people through the lens of being on a journey. That’s why there are so many different personalities and different sounds. However, because it's a concept album and there has to be one overall atmosphere present throughout we had just one arranger.

I’ve never made an album like this before so it was a really fresh way to work. By having a set time limit and concept, with the labour we were able to put into it, I think we struck upon an idea that one wouldn’t usually come across. I really think all the songs came together well.”

The 5th track ‘universe’ is a majestic but mysterious ballad that one can hear at the Ikebukuro planetarium ‘Starlight Dome Manten’ in Tokyo.

M: “I really love planetariums. At first you get that it’s only a projection of stars but gradually you begin to feel like you’re actually floating in the cosmos. A feeling of space so vast it’s scary…There’s a moment when you’re in the planetarium when there’s a link between your everyday sense of reality and the feeling of being taken into space.

Even though I don’t really like the trend recently of getting in touch with one’s spiritual side (laugh) I wanted to express the idea that the relationship between oneself and the universe is not something difficult at all. I wanted to look at the things we can’t easily explain from all sides and give them form in music, the big events we have no control over and the meetings of destiny.”

With today’s technology, it would be easy to create this magnificence through piling up sound after sound but Sakamoto’s songs still retain the feeling of being ‘live’. Without any sense of being ‘just sounds we added together’, they resonate clearly within the soul. There’s a reason for this too.

M: “I think right now it’s seen as normal to record a number of takes and select the best one [when recording]. But a singing voice is a living thing, it’s always changing. It isn’t just ‘sing this part over and over and it will be fine’. So this time we had a lot of songs where the rule was ‘one time only’. Although, as usual, I sang oblivious to the fact that ‘there is no next time’.”

It’s been 11 years since Maaya Sakamoto started singing. Never compromising, there’s an inherently good feeling about this person who continues to challenge new things. We asked this woman who says: ‘It’s natural for me to have singing as the centre of my life’, what she would do if she went on a long trip herself…

M: “I want to go on a journey all by myself! I want to live life by going to a lot of different countries. I’d like to experience music that crosses borderlines easily and the wonderful food one can find abroad (laugh)”