life-is-a-BUMPy-ride

Part 7/15: Suimin Jikan

Next is “Suimin Jikan,” the acoustic coupling to “Only Lonely Glory” and what I consider to be an extremely personal song.

Fujiwara: This is from when my grandpa died and… It’s that kind of song. He was hospitalized for cancer. I went to go see him and when we were alone in his room – he was on a lot of morphine as a pain killer and his articulation wasn’t that good, but he could keep a conversation going just fine. 

再

エノコログサ（猫じゃらし）

夏から秋にかけてつける花穂が、犬の尾に似ていることから、犬っころ草（いぬっころくさ）が転じてエノコログサという呼称になったとされる。

Part 3/15: Bye Bye Thank You

You made this song for a friend who went to Belgium?

Fujiwara: Yes, I did.

Can you talk about the specifics?

Fujiwara: I wrote it about five years before “Tentai Kansoku.” In 1996, maybe…

At what age?

Fujiwara: 17 or 18, I think. It was for someone who looked out for me in high school… I say high school, but it was only for a brief time (laughs). An upperclassman looked out for me, and when he found out he was going abroad to study, he asked me to write a song for him… That’s all I remember.

What were your thoughts when you wrote it?

Fujiwara: … I don’t remember.

Present From You

Credit: Shikappe

Part 1/15: Introduction

Firstly, the jacket. It’s pure white (laughs). It’s a cliché saying, but I feel as if you’ve given a great gift to music with this collection. The warmth and gentleness so characteristic of your music is very well represented here.

Fujiwara Motoo (V&G): This is the second time we’ve been interviewed about the release of the album, but the last time we weren’t able to reflect on it. What I mean by that is that since we hadn’t started the mastering process, we didn’t have any way to listen to all the songs in the order they were going to be in. If we had a mastered version we could listen whenever we wanted, but we didn’t have the chance. We saw the song titles written down on paper. We had seen them written on paper, but we had a hard time imagining what it would be like. That’s why we couldn’t say what the album was like in that last interview. Only Chama had any sort of idea – he lined up the previous recordings of the songs in the same order as the album and listened to that – but that’s still too different from the finished product.

Naoi Yoshifumi (B): Yeah, completely different.