ーIn your debut live stream, you launched an original song, “Excuse My Rudeness, But Could You Please RIP?” Can you tell us the circumstances of how you made that song?
The original name of that song was “Shitsurei Shimasuga Shinde Kudasai,” but COVER Corp. said, “No, you can’t call it that!” because the Japanese kanji for death is too strong, so we changed it to “RIP” instead of “Shinde Kudasai.” This was an idea for a song I had before I became the artist named Mori Calliope and I was just The Grim Reaper. I think people were shocked and didn’t know what it was about just from the title. But, I worked with an artist I respected from my earlier time of being interested in niconico rap and niconico music. His name is K’s kokorobeats (kokorobeats, a.k.a K’s/Coro), and he made the track for that. We didn’t expect it to become so popular because hololive English was suddenly becoming very popular. Many people listen to that song because I think they were interested in the group. The reason why I made that song is that I saw that so many idols gave a very strong impression when they had their debut songs. Making one song did not take too much time for me, so before I debuted, I thought, “Well, I just make an entire EP including that song.” I thought it would make a strong impression on my viewers, so they could see how hard I try. I tried very hard!
ーIt may not be easy to answer since you already have made a lot of songs. Please choose three songs which represent you and tell us the reason why you chose them.
Oh wow! That’s really a tough question, but I think I can choose three. I would think about my past, present, and future when I choose these songs. For my past, I would choose “end of a life” because it’s about my past in the underground rap scene and sort of leaving that life and continuing as me, Mori Calliope, that everyone knows now.
My present would be “The Grim Reaper is a Live-Streamer,” which is my theme song about my life. The title is literally “The Grim Reaper is a Live-Streamer,” which is what I’m doing.
I’m a live streamer. It just talks about my daily life as a streamer, but it’s also very catchy. And for my future, that’s very tough, but I think maybe I would choose a song from the EP, SHINIGAMI NOTE... I’m not sure how much I can talk about it because it has not been released yet, so I won’t tell you the title of that song. But there is a song about sort of taking over the world and maybe ending the world also. That’s kind of crazy, but it’s more about just my new vibes and feeling for the future, and maybe starting my own new world order, new underworld order, and sort of giving 100% to being Mori Calliope that the whole world can see and look up to and whose music they can enjoy.
ーYou have done a lot of collaboration songs as well. Which collab songs are especially impressive to you?
The ones that I think about often as my best work are collaborations with my genmate, Gawr Gura from hololive English. She’s also an amazing singer. It’s my dream to someday make a song with every member of hololive English. So, with Gura, we made a song called “Q.” What does “Q” stand for is... well, it’s a secret! You have to decide for yourself. “Q” has an animated music video. I asked someone who makes many animations for hololive production to make the music video for us. Since Gura and I are good friends who can just have a good time and be very silly together, we made up an alternate universe where we are both gang leaders and fighting against each other. When I wrote the lyrics, I tried to think about similar struggles that Gura and I face together as hololive English idols. There are very strong lyrics that say... sort of... there’re two strong ladies fighting against the world. Sometimes there’re people watching us who are not so nice to us. So, it’s sort of a song where maybe if you watch the music video, you think it’s me vs. Gura, but instead, it’s more like us defending ourselves from some of the nasty people who comment negative things about us.
ーIt seems like you are fighting each other, but you aren’t. You two guys are teaming up against a huge enemy.
Yeah, exactly! The viewers expect so much from us. They expect us to be perfect all the time, but we don’t want to be like that. We are just humans! It must be the hidden meaning of that song, I think.
ーYou also stream gameplays and English classes which are also interesting. What do you keep in mind when you stream anything other than music?
I want to be entertaining! I want to capture people’s attention and make them happy outside of their everyday life. Because everyday life is so tiring and working every day makes you very very tired. A long time ago, I also worked from morning to night at jobs, and it made me very very tired, and I think about that time when I stream. Because I’d love to come home and be entertained after work. When I watched anime, other streamers playing games, and YouTube videos, I could relax from the real world. So now, I can provide that kind of entertainment to people who are coming from work and who want to relax and watch something fun to forget about sad things in the real world in day-to-day life.
