Tuesday, January 04, 2005

New Advantage Lucy Songs!

It’s been so long since Japanese pop band advantage Lucy’s last album came out (2001) that when they release new songs, we true believer fans leap at them like hungry carp from a pond at pieces of bread.

So, when I heard that a soundtrack for a play called Skip included THREE new Lucy songs, I dropped what I was doing to place an order on-line. Happy with myself, I e-mailed my friend Dr. I to ask if he’d heard about the soundtrack, noting I’d already ordered it. But Dr. I, being possibly one of the few people in the world more fanatical than me about advantage Lucy, replied that yes, he knew about it, and furthermore, since it will take two weeks or more for a CD ordered on-line to be shipped, he decided he will instead go directly to the theater shop to buy the CD. And he got the CD before I did. As the Japanese saying goes – ‘ue ni wa ue ga iru’, or, ‘you think you’re a big advantage Lucy fan, but somewhere, there’s always a bigger fan.’

Anyway, the CD – joy! It has three great songs Lucy has been performing live recently: ‘Everything’, ‘Glider’, and ‘Is This Love?’. My favorite, which I’ve listened to about seven times straight tonight, is ‘Glider’, a song in Japanese. It starts with a rocking guitar intro, but singer Aiko sings in a mellow way at moderate tempo.


Aiko of advantage Lucy. Posted by Hello

The lyrics are touching. They are about remembering the past (one of Lucy’s main themes in recent songs) while flying a glider. But though the lyrics don’t specifically say this, I think this is a song about Fukumura-kun, Lucy’s former guitarist who passed away last year.

The song begins (my translation):

I remember, that wind, that ray of sunlight
Even if I forget, they are near me

And has two lines I love:

The glider can fly on without end
Taking with it a heart on verge of
breaking

Aiko, who wrote the lyrics, has said that Fukumura-kun is like the wind to her now, ever-present. This must be a song about living with his memory.

***

‘Skip’, by the way, is the latest play by the Tokyo theater group Caramel Box. This soundtrack is going to be playing on my iPod a lot as I wait patiently for the bright day rumored to be visiting us early this year, when Lucy’s next album comes out...

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