#let alone creating myself in my image the spite is a bonus

[yellow-g0ache]

Someone's probably already said it but I'd rather rip and tear at my flesh and destroy my beautiful feminine image and be assured the reflection in the mirror is mine than see a pretty face I don't feel at home in

[kimonobeat]

aiko bon: Official “Natsufuku” liner notes

aiko’s 3rd album, released under Pony Canyon on June 20, 2001. The album includes two of her biggest hits and went on to sell over a million copies.

Hikouki (飛行機; Airplane)

be master of life

Rosie (ロージー)

Hisoka na Sayonara no Shikata (密かなさよならの仕方; The Subtle Way to Goodbye)

Owaranai Hibi (Endless Days)

Kokoro Biyori (心日和; Weather of My Heart)

September

Ame Fumu Overall (雨踏むオーバーオール; Overalls Stepping in the Rain)

Aspara (アスパラ; Asparagus)

Boyfriend (ボーイフレンド)

Hatsukoi (初恋; First Love)

Natsufuku (夏服; Summer Clothes)

(Thank you parasmichael for the commission!)

☑ The album as a whole

Oh! I’m eating tulips on the cover. I cut my hair outside just before doing the photo shoot at this one tulip place. Where’d we go for this again? Kobuchisawa? We rented out a bed and breakfast and did a little photo shoot in some flower garden-looking place. Has it really only been 3 years since then? It feels like a long time ago. It’d only been 3 years since I’d made my debut but everyone had stopped calling me a ‘newcomer’ by then. I was feeling sort of unsure of myself at the time. I developed nodules on my vocal cords during the tour I did after this album was released. Looking back on it now, though, I feel like there were early symptoms of it during recording. I was so hellbent on making it that I just barrelled on ahead anyway. And because of that, I feel like making this album in spite all of that got me back to looking on the bright side of things again.

☑ Hikouki

Such a dramatic song. I wrote this song on Day 1 of my Gb column. I got lost trying to make my way to the place where we were doing the shoot. The plan was to go to the Metropolitan Building but my manager and I got lost trying to go there by car. Then my manager went outside to make a phone call so I just sat in the car, staring blankly out the window. It was Sunday, so there was no one around. I looked at the sky and saw a plane flying way, way up there, and wrote this song while looking at it. I was feeling the teeniest tiniest bit lonely coming to Tokyo on my own. “I’m ALL ALONE,” I kept thinking to myself. I think that’s where the chorus came from. I worked hard to get to Tokyo and yet I also felt like there was this part of me that’d been left behind. I wrote the song by combining those feelings with emotions you feel when you’re in love. I wanted the arrangement of the song to have a bittersweet feel to it as well so I told them something that made no sense. I was like, “I want you to make it sound like [the comedy duo] Kamaitachi.” (laughs) But the strings sound very ‘Kamaitachi’ to me. We also shot a music video for this song. Both my manager and Nagai are in that music video, by the way. (laughs) Everyone looks so young! I have a lot of good memories from this music video. I feel pretty embarrassed seeing myself smoke in the MV, though. (laughs)

☑ be master of life

This is the one song that features my fans’ voices. I used the voices of everyone who came to see me at a fan club concert. We recorded it and then included it on the track. There was a microphone hanging down above the audience and I went, “On the count of three: one, two, three!” The crowd gets really worked up over this song at concertsーyou just can’t sit still to this song, pretty much as soon as the intro starts. It’s a love song, but my friend from Osaka was the one who inspired it. She’s a really nice person who’s almost like, too scared to come into contact with others in case she accidentally hurts their feelings. But she really is a nice person who’s helped me out a lot. I was trying to think of something I could do to help her out when this song came to mind. It was on the same demo tape as “Hatsukoi,” “Hisoka na Sayonara no Shikata”, “Ame Fumu Overalls”, “Hikouki”, “Owaranai Hibi” and “Kokoro Biyori”. A lot of the songs on this album were made around the same time.

☑ Rosie See ‘Rosie’ single liner notes

☑ Hisoka na Sayonara no Shikata See ‘Boyfriend’ single liner notes

☑ Owaranai Hibi

This is my mom’s favorite song. (laughs) She told me she liked it. I really think it has this sort of ‘one-on-one’ feeling when I sing it. When you take the chords, the overall atmosphere of the song, the melody, the lyrics, and put them all together, it almost feels like I’m just chatting away. In the song I’m saying, “I’m going to say what’s on my mind. I’m a normal girl too. There’s no such thing as a person who is innocent, completely pure of heart, and has never once lied in their entire life. I lie sometimes, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. And even though I do, I like you. Is that okay?” I really like how thick the instrumental gets after the chorus.

☑ Kokoro Biyori

I pictured this as a rock song in the very beginning when I wrote it, but then the finished version Shimayan did had a completely different arrangement. Sometimes Shimayan takes me completely by surprise with his arrangements. This song was like a sucker punch to the heart. I said, “Wow, I like this better!!” The strings come in over top of that opening bass lick, and that rhythm! I get so excited about it. I got so carried away that I came up with a dance for it in the studio. Doing a dance escalated to me appearing on stage in a kigurumi. I wrote the lyrics by finding similarities between the weather and my state of mind. One of my friends is a free spiritーshe’s a total mystery, that one. I’m only just now starting to talk about some things with her even though I’ve known her for over 10 years at this point, but she’s a total mystery to me. (laughs) Like, just when I think she’s showed up randomly to see me, she’s gone. I was surprised to hear that she’d been feeling pretty lonely for a while. You could say I ended up modeling it after her. “‘Kokoro Biyori’ is great! I love it!” she told me not too long ago. “I really love ‘Kokoro Biyori’!” (laughs) I was glad to hear that but didn’t tell her she was the person I modeled the song after.

☑ September

I love this song. I mean, I like them allーthey’re my songs, after all. (laughs) This song was created on the radio. When I was on “All Night Nippon” I did this special feature called “The Big Single Campaign” where I’d play 2 or 3 of my singles on the piano. Someone said to make a song about September because it was September so I started singing. Then the mixing guy Kawabeーwho was always dead silentーsaid, “That was great, aiko!” I was so excited that Kawabe said that he liked it, I wrote this song. You could say I decided to make it into a song because of that. So thank you, Kawabe! (laughs) It’s sort of an ‘answer song’. I mean, it’s got the words ‘cry baby’ in it. I sorta have, like, really strong feelings about this song. One time I sang this song just as the sun was setting during a concert I did in Enoshima or someplace like that. It was lovely. This song brought out a whole new side of me, in a lot of different ways. Like, “Hanabi” allowed me to be on TV nationwide and release an album, but the public image of me being this super cheerful girl with a bob cut who wore used jeans stuck. People were always saying that it didn’t seem like I ever had any troubles. I thought it was a pretty good thing to be seen that way. In my mind, if I was making people smile, then maybe that was just fine; I was lucky. But I do worry, and cry, and get mad, and sometimes I feel sad. I feel like I was able to express that in this song. Writing the line “Don’t ever think that I’m always cheerful” instantly made things so much easier for me. I wanted to be closer to the girls who’ve had this happen to them too. I personally feel that writing that one phrase, and then including the song on the album, is what made “Natsufuku” complete. I can’t thank Kawabe enough, seriously. I’ve told him ‘thank you’ a million times and it’s still not enough. I wonder how he’s doing?

☑ Ame Fumu Overall

I love overalls. Really, I do. I’m pretty much as small as they come and can never find my size though, so they’re always big on me. I used to love dressing in super baggy clothes, which meant the hems got wet any time it rained. That’s what got me to write this song. It was already kinda cold out and I was feeling down because I had just had my heart broken. Like, “Ahh… I wish I could just disappear…” I wrote this song in Shounai out in Toyonaka, Osaka after something really terrible had happened to me. The song features a key change in the chorus after the B melody. “Bold choice, there,” people said to me in the beginning. I never like, calculate where I’m going with a song when I do key changes though, so I didn’t really know what to say when people asked why I added in a key change there. I would just say, “Hm, why indeed.” (laughs)

☑ Aspara See ‘Hatsukoi’ single liner notes

☑ Boyfriend See ‘Boyfriend’ single liner notes

☑ Hatsukoi See ‘Hatsukoi’ single liner notes

☑ Natsufuku

I wrote this song while we were recording, on the piano in the second studio at Hitokuchizaka. I told them I’d written a song I wanted them to listen to and they said it sounded good, but we were in the final stages of recording. “We’ve already got enough,” they told me. “Then let’s make it a bonus track!” I said. I almost always write my songs at home. I’ve never really written songs anywhere else, but I always manage to write a song any time I play the piano during my free time at Hitokuchizaka Studio. Oftentimes I’m able to come up with a completely different kind of song because I’m in a different environment. For this one, I wrote the entire lyrics and melody in the studio on the grand piano in this tiny little room at Hitokuchizaka. I wrote it all in one goーit came together super quickly. I don’t think I spent more than maybe 15 or 20 minutes on it tops. When I come up with a song, I’m able to write it super quick. The title of the song was set in stone as “Natsufuku”, but still hadn’t decided what to call the album then. I said, “Alright, I know we made it a bonus track, but why not go with ‘Natsufuku’?” They wouldn’t play the title track on the radio if it were a bonus track though, and that wouldn’t work for a title track. You know how there’s a specific day in school for changing the uniform? It always felt a little bittersweet to me, seeing the guy I liked change into the summer uniform or the winter uniform. It felt like I was seeing a part of them I never knew about. It always would make me feel like I’d been left behind. The same went for my friends, too. Seeing everyone changing while I was still wearing the old uniform was an extremely lonely thing to experience. I wanted to express that sort of sadness you feel when you’re in love, too. The turning point from winter clothes to summer clothes in particular really brings out that feeling of heartbreak in me. Really, it doesーthe words ‘winter clothes’ and ‘summer clothes’ make me so sad. I guess it just… reminds me of being in school. It really breaks my heart to see my crush wearing a scarf, ‘cause I feel like I’ve seen something about them I didn’t know. I get really wistful. I’m the one playing the piano on this track, right after “Bob”. I get nervous doing that because of how excited I get. We also placed the microphone so that it’s taking in everything all at once: one microphone in the middle of the grand piano, capturing everything on a single mic rather than setting out a mic for vocals. We went out of our way to record it like that because I wanted it to sound like I was playing by myself in a little room.