ーYou write lyrics by blending English and Japanese. How did you come up with this style?
I didn’t speak any Japanese when I started listening to Japanese music. But, over time, as I made more Japanese friends, I started talking to them on Twitter, and they taught me Japanese, and I started learning more from Japanese music and putting more Japanese words and phrases slowly into my music. And over time, I entered the underground scene, and I realized that I had to start putting more Japanese into my music. Because Japanese fans couldn’t connect very well to only English songs that I sing for them. So, I started using Japanese more and more, and now it’s very normal for me to at least include a little bit of Japanese in every song so that Japanese listeners can at least find a word or a phrase to understand and maybe understand what that song is about.
ーIntroduce your environment in music production and which software you usually use. And how did you learn them?
I have my own home studio that I was using very often before I joined Universal Music. Now I go to the professional studio provided by them to record. But before then, I did everything by myself and with my own engineer. At that time, I was using a MANLEY microphone. It’s very expensive, but my voice sounds extremely clear and as good as studio-quality when I record through it. And I use what is called the RME Babyface Pro interface. And, for my Digital Audio Workstation, I use Cubase for recording because my music producer friends had always recommended it to me and they use it too, so I started to learn it. I can’t produce music in Cubase, but I use it for recording vocals and organizing my vocals to send to the mixing engineer to make the sound actually... be good, I guess. I do all my own recording and selection processes by myself with Cubase.
