This is an interview with Kitasono Minami about his third (and, as of this writing, most recent) EP, Never Let Me Go. Also included are his liner notes for each song. Enjoy!
Interview & text: Kato Naoko (Japanese text)
English translation: Henkka
Kitasono Minami links: Website, Blog, Twitter, SoundCloud
Note: You can buy Never Let Me Go on CDJapan.
Interview
Kitasono Minami, who released his second EP, lumiere, this past July, continues to showcase his increasingly colorful realm of pop. But the artist himself remains shrouded in mystery, choosing still not to reveal his face in any promotional photos. The fact is, however, that even this mystique is something that gives his work a certain kind of charm.
Being in charge of writing all the lyrics and music, doing all the arranging and singing, performing all manner of instruments by himself, but also featuring in his captivating world of sound a great number of highly skilled supporting players—beginning with the strings and a brass section—Kitasono Minami surely offers one so many different ways of enjoying his music, capturing the listener’s imagination.
And now, bringing a renewed sense of inspiration to that sound world is his third EP, Never Let Me Go, which was just released a short while ago. With a focus on winter songs, this work features five warm, bountiful numbers that make for perfect listening as we near the Christmas season. With some new performers taking part in the recordings—Ishiwaka Shun on drums, Kusui Satsuki and Morita Yusuke on bass, Ogaeri Ami on piano—the involvement of these young, spirited jazz musicians is surely another important characteristic of the work.
Eager to learn more about this highly interesting EP whose lyrics stand in stark contrast to its bright sound, we conducted an email interview with the artist himself.
— This being your first seasonal album, what made you settle on this particular concept?
Kitasono Minami: I had a bunch of these winter-themed songs I’d written previously, and I just started making this album with the hope of actually doing something with them.
— So you didn’t write them from scratch—you already had a stockpile of songs that you then recorded for this release. Was there anything besides the winter theme that you tried to be conscious of during the production of this album?
Kitasono: Looking back, I think I was trying to do away with all my fixations and just be spontaneous. Sometimes, when you’re struggling with the search for something new… For example, say there’s a certain tone on some instrument that has worked for you previously, but you feel like you’ve already used it too much so you maybe shouldn’t use it anymore. Well, I just went ahead and used it anyway.
Same thing with my writing—I tried to avoid doing anything unnatural which I felt like the music didn’t need. I just kept it simple and safe. I think I tried to be conscious about not going overboard with anything.
— While it’s difficult to exactly define what a “wintery sound” means, to me all the songs do sound warm, each possessing a different form of winter about them. Personally, I especially liked the “winteriness” of “Fuyu wo Kazoete.“
Kitasono: The piano in “Fuyu wo Kazoete” features lots of these really dense chords, and then the guitar on top makes it sound even denser. For me, that density of sound reminds me of the cold winter sky. So that might be one of the reasons the song gives you that wintery feeling.
— I see. So there are tricks to using tones and the sound as a whole that can be used to create that winter-like effect.
By the way, do you have any personal favorite winter songs by other artists?
Kitasono: As far as winter songs go, NRBQ’s “Christmas Wish” is so good it hurts. This is something that could be said about other NRBQ songs, too, but when you’re listening to their material it’s like you’re never quite sure if it’s actually refined or not—I can’t figure out what’s what. That to me is their appeal.
— Absolutely, that really is a wonderful song.
Next, I’d like to ask you about the songs one-by-one. The first song, “Contrition,” features a memorable, fanfare-like opening with the horns as well as a duet with Sakakibara Kaori (Lamp). It’s very lively. I feel like your previous works also had these similarly impactful songs as the openers. What were you conscious of this time with “Contrition”?
Kitasono: “Contrition” itself includes a short prelude, so it was my plan for it to be the first song. When I tried just as an experiment to listen to it followed by “Hisan na Christmas,” I liked how that the almost musical-like phrase in the outro of that song linked to the more serious second song, so that’s what I decided to go for.
— Ah, I see. You’re right. (laughs)
On that note, I’d like to ask you about “Hisan na Christmas.” Obviously, the thing that first stands out is that very impactful title (“Miserable Christmas”). The lyric “watashi wo hanasanaide” as sung by the backing vocals obviously points to the album title, which means it must be a song with some significance to this particular release.
Kitasono: The music and lyrics to this song came to me in a dream as an elementary schooler. I never forgot them, and so I made them into a song here. It’s by no means a “cool” song, and the lyrics just naturally came out sounding pathetic.
The title of the album is in regards to all sorts of things in my life to which I imagine myself pleading, “never let me go.” It also ties into the lyrics of “Fuyu wo Kazoete.”
— What?! The fact that the song took form in an elementary school era dream of yours is amazing in and of itself, but then so is the fact that you still actually remembered it…!
On the topic of the lyrics—and while this is only my personal impression—after the lyrical “harshness” of “Contrition” and the “patheticness” of “Hisan na Christmas,” it’s like “Fuyu wo Kazoete” finally offers some salvation in a way… That’s the feeling I got from that sequence of songs anyway. Was there like an underlying theme with these three songs?
Kitasono: All of the songs are stories about failure and about anxiety in regards to the future. “Nothing good ever seems to happen for me as of late. But then there have been times in the past where I’ve been even worse off than I am now. And besides, looking back, was there ever really a time when things were happening for me…?” That’s the theme—like this resigned acceptance of life.
— The third song, smack in the middle and consisting solely of Inoue Jinichiro on acoustic and gut guitar, is an instrumental titled “Gelatin.” It’s short but so nice!
Kitasono: That one wasn’t originally meant for this album. I wrote the song as an experiment, wanting to do something a bit unusual. I felt like it worked both as an interlude to cool things down after “Hisan na Christmas” as well as a prelude to “Fuyu wo Kazoete,” and so I decided to put it on the album.
— The other instrumental, “Machi no Houseki,” is a number that is memorable for its various synth sounds. It feels like it might work as a song with vocals, too.
Kitasono: I first started working on this song back when I hadn’t yet decided whether Never Let Me Go was going to be an EP or a single. I like Bob James and stuff like that, and I was just trying to make something in that vein. Had I been able to pull off singing the melody I might’ve done so—kind of in the style of, say, Pierre Barouh or Boris Vian. But I wasn’t able to do that here, and so it became an instrumental.
— I see. So it’s possible we might one day hear a version with you singing it!
This release also features lots of young jazz musicians, such as Ishiwaka Shun. What made you decide on this sort of lineup for the recordings?
Kitasono: As the arrangements on the whole are so tight, I felt that it’d be a good idea to not have the rhythm bar lines be too rigid so as to still allow for some breathing room. And so, I assembled a group of jazz musicians who usually do mostly improvisation, and just as I’d hoped the results overall were filled with this fun sense of groove.
— Ah, so that was the intention. Was there anything else about this release that you were particular about?
Kitasono: Building on the last two releases, my thinking was that to achieve better results I would have to start writing everything down in the score beforehand. So this time around, due to me having more parts I had to write, arranging became a much more involved and time-consuming process.
By holding myself back from what I call the “physical method” of composing—that is, creating material through playing and singing—that gave it a restrained kind of overall feeling.
— When discussing “Yuugiri” in the lumiere interview, you said you were trying to make that song “as close to my music as possible.” Similarly, was there anything you were trying to do on this release?
Kitasono: I tried to not make pointless references or like just cobble together phrases everyone has already heard before—or even if I did, I tried to only capture the very essence of the elements I was borrowing and build around them with my own ideas. In that sense it is at least to some extent more “my music.”
— Never Let Me Go shares its title with the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (Japanese title: Watashi wo Hanasanaide), and I was wondering if there was a connection of some kind… What are your thoughts as to the title?
Kitasono: I got hooked on Kazuo Ishiguro this past summer and read a bunch of his work. I borrowed the title from his novel as well as from a jazz standard that appears within the story itself. The words themselves look nice visually so I thought they’d work well on the cover, and even just the sound of the words “watashi wo hanasanaide” sounded so pleasant to me. Those were my reasons for giving it this title.
Liner Notes
Here are song-by-song liner notes for Never Let Me Go.
Text: Kitasono Minami (Japanese text: main part, “Hisan na Christmas” intro)
English translation: Henkka
“Contrition”
This song is one I wrote around five years ago for a Christmas song contest. With the reward being in the million yen range—and me falling behind with my rent payments being a regular occurrence—I started working on this song entirely with that in mind. However, the very last step of the process involved having to write an application letter, the thought of which I found so bothersome I just gave up entirely and shelved the song.
While I originally wrote this as a “16-beat” (16th note feel) song, I changed it into a “4-beat” (swing) because I wanted to create a contrast in rhythm and tempo between this song and what I planned as—and what eventually became—the next song, “Hisan na Christmas.” I very much like the almost musical-sounding optimism of this song and how it then ties to the somewhat more serious song that follows it.
At the moment, I’m always trying out different things in preparation for future projects when it comes to wind instrumentation. This time around, I had two trumpets, one tenor sax, and one trombone. Actually recording that formation, it sounded so light and colorful that I’d definitely like to employ it again at some point.
In the left channel you can hear these guitar phrases that sound improvised, but in fact nothing in there was ad-libbed—it all came from the score. To pull off something like that—something that on the first listen sounds like this wild ad-lib thing, but on the second listen makes you realize how there’s actually no room there for improvisation—you need someone who’s a real master of their craft. There’s a bit of that Ritenour feel, a bit of that Scofield feel… Or the feel of the great rock guitarist type who’s trying their hand at jazz so they sound just a tiny bit out of tune but nevertheless cool so it still works… They can do it all.
“Hisan na Christmas”
Here is an overview of the intro.
The main melody is played by oboe and flute as well as a toned-down semi-acoustic guitar. As this combination of instruments lacks a bit of tonal strength, I had to try and be very mindful of the balance between the woodwinds and the brass.
The brass section first appears almost as if quietly flowing in.
While the main melody is played in forte, the horn section is played in mezzo-piano and piano, bringing out differences in tonal quality and volume.
On bar 5, the trombone takes over the main melody, while in the background you have the left-hand piano chords that follow the saxophones, plus a unison between the PPG synth and the right-hand piano.
The image I had in my mind with this background was that of the piano supplementing the saxophones and the PPG synth. Two saxophones wouldn’t be able to perfectly construct the chords here (Bbm7 & F7alt), and I couldn’t just have the trombone do the inner voicings as it’s already playing the main melody. Furthermore, the trumpet would be inadequate in terms of its range. And so, knowing that it would be a recording—one with the volume balance of a pop song—I combined them with the piano. The results were… passable. The piano is, after all, an instrument of attenuating sound, so blending its long tones with those of the wind instruments was kind of illogical. Still, when you bring the character and volume of each part as close to one another as possible, you can hear just the tiniest improvement in the effect.
This song is a mishmash, being a combination of one part I composed in the winter three years ago, and the chorus I came up with in my sleep back in elementary school. As one might expect from the mind of your average elementary schooler, the melody in the chorus evokes a do-mi-sol chord, but now—ten-odd years later—it’s actually accompanied by re-fa-la-do, thus refining the opening note of the chorus from a 5th to an 11th. Upon listening to it, even though the melody is simple you’ll notice how the chord is slightly pointed.
It’s been a long journey with me and the “Hisan na Christmas / Nakayoku shiyou yo” stanza since I first heard it in a dream. The very straightforward melody—being even more so when it was in its original key of C major—and the equally straightforward, laughable lyrics, there was a time I wished I could just erase it from my mind altogether. I did, however, end up making it into a complete song, and my reason for doing so was simply a lack of any better ideas.
As such, “Hisan na Christmas” is a rather embarrassing song for me personally, and I wanted to make that clear in its mood as well. Thus, I laid out all these triplet phrases throughout the song, giving it the feel of a sleigh being pulled along by a galloping horse.
This phrase, which combines the rhythm and tonal pattern, is interspersed in a dozen different places throughout the song. However, no two of them sound exactly alike. Figuring it would make the piece sound somewhat more lively, I changed things like the instrumentation or the voicings with each instance to signify in musical form how the daily actions you perform, no matter how similar, are still never exactly the same. Comparing them side-by-side, you’ll notice how they’re all different even if they might initially seem all the same. It gives the song this modest sense of change and progression.
“Gelatin”
Writing musical notation on paper is this process where you’re always thinking, just to give an example: “Since the part here sounds like that, maybe I’ll have this other part here go like this.” But if you were to assume that’s all one thinks about during this process, you’d be surprised to know that sometimes what’s at the core of one’s mind is something completely irrelevant. Something along the lines of… “I wonder what I should put in tomorrow’s curry?”
It’s a song in which one can hear just a slight sense of anticipation.
“Fuyu wo Kazoete”
Due to the fluctuating tempo of this song, there were more than a few times during recording when I could see that the performers were struggling with it. To some extent I was already expecting as much though, so even when they did make mistakes I could just laugh it off. Still, they had to follow along—or rather, try and keep pace with—gradual tempo changes of 10 beats per bar. It must’ve been quite nerve-wracking.
Music, as it was first born, knew no metronome: as is common knowledge, we remained free of its shackles until the time of Beethoven. Now that making music which is perfectly uniform—in any which way—is but a simple matter, one can assume that quite a lot of music has come to be while employing the metronome only due to the fact that it makes things easy. I personally have my doubts as to whether this extremely strict control of rhythm truly produces the desired effect.
Therefore, one of the things I would like to try in my work going forward is to have that pop music rhythm breathe more naturally, and this song with its miniscule tempo changes is an experiment in preparation for just that. As you listen to this song, I would like for you to think of it as a precursor to my eventual future work.
“Machi no Houseki”
I myself would never think to go outdoors during wintertime. However, in my mind’s eye, I like to imagine the snow not feeling cold, the decorative lights all shining bright, everyone with a healthy glow on their faces, no one frowning at the tingling midwinter air, even the most guarded people among us not feeling unhappy. I wrote this song with the image of strolling through that sort of a “convenient” winter town, making it a very carefree tune that possesses no sense of reality.
But even though it is my own song, it feels like it isn’t. I believe this feeling of a lack of reality—not only with this song but with other ones as well—results from instances where the songwriting and arranging has happened automatically, as if by itself.
Lots of vintage synthesizers were used on this song. These kinds of tones might sound a bit cheap if judged by today’s values, and while the plan was to make use of that aspect as but one ingredient in the mix, once the synthesizers were actually brought into the studio I then saw my objective as trying to get them to sound neutral. It still remains a challenge. But then, to make something like those 80s Bob James albums that he made using a bunch of synths—albums which had a sound that was both extremely lightweight yet luxurious—accomplishing that surely required a lot of time, effort, and now rare equipment. More than anything else, what musicians need to be is obsessed.
This challenge looks to be the driving force towards my next release, and a work with that as its foundation could never be called “pure.” However, similarly to how a writer might deal with the same recurring themes in his work, I too am going to keep making the sort of synthesizer music which, were it to be played on the radio, would not even get its title read aloud.
