We only sold a limited number of copies of this single. Both of the coupling tracks were songs from my indie days. Taking songs from my indie years, re-arranging them, re-recording the vocals and then releasing them was a huge breakthrough for me, which makes this release feel sort of special to me. When we placed the order for the lyric sheet with a family-run washi paper store in Toyama, they said, “Now we don’t need to work for a whole year.” (laughs) I really like the music video for this song. Everyone in it is a friend of mine from school, except for Tatsu Tatsu on the keyboard. I just love how cool we look jamming out and having fun together. This song wasn’t really like, inspired by anything in particularーit honestly just kinda came to me all at once. It was pretty easy to decide to put it on a single. I basically wrote the song in 5 or 10 minutes. And the director and the head of my talent agency really took a shine to it almost immediately. (laughs) I didn’t even have anything in mind for the kind of song I wanted to write when I wrote “Sakura no Toki,” it just came together instantly. I’ve never been flower viewing because of my pollen allergies, though…
This is one of my indie songs. I hadn’t released it on anything yet, but it was the very first song I’d ever written in my entire life. I got into a contest with itーthis song started a lot of things for me. The structure is really jumbled up. I wrote it without knowing anything about the whole ‘1st verse, 2nd verse, chorus, bridge, chorus’ thing, so this song’s more like, ‘1st, 2nd, chorus, bridge, chorus, key change, chorus again’. (laughs) This was when I thought the higher the key, the better. I wrote this song because I wanted to take part in the contest and thought it would be better to participate using my own song. When I sang it at the contest, my friend who majored in jazz piano at music school played for me so it had more of a jazz arrangementーlike, she really went for it during the piano interlude. And all that ad-libbing I do in the intro too! So here she was on the piano pounding on the keys, and I’m over here going “Whoa whoa whoa yeah~” I was singing so high you’d think it was a dog whining or something. I’m really glad this song made it onto a CD.
Okay, so first of allーthe skull on the lyric sheet doesn’t mean anything. (laughs) Also, this is Shimada’s magic at work. The original was bossanova. But, he made it into something completely different. The tempo is slower too. I tell Shimada how I want him to make my songs, but every now and them he comes up with something totally different. And when he does, I’m always so into it that I just say, “Wow, I like this better!” This song turned out completely different from what I’d told him but I thought it was really neat. We just kept doing arrangements like this afterwards. The lyrics don’t really mean much at all. I wanted to include some letters that didn’t really make much senseーI kind of just wanted to write something like thatーand this song has those in there. This is after the fact, but I feel like you can tell how she feels by lining up all the symbols. Like, it enhances the feelings I’m trying to communicateーthe happy feelings that the girl’s telling you about show in the symbols. I like that. I think Chiba was the one who gave me the idea to stick the skull in there. It’s on the “Doutei Omnibus” CD, but I’m still really happy I got to do this indie song one more time. It was incredible getting to sing the same song all over again in the studio, and it really breathed new life into it. It almost feels like a brand new song. I’m really happy about that.