Kenshi Yonezu/Hachi - LOST CORNER

Billboard Japan, August 23rd, 2024 (Original Article)

It's Fine To Be Broken, Or "Junk" - After Four Years, Album LOST CORNER Sings of "Having Something That Can't Be Taken Away"

Kenshi Yonezu's album LOST CORNER has been released. This new work comes 4 years after his previous, STRAY SHEEP, and is a dense package that features a whole 10 tie-in songs, including the theme song for the film "How Do You Live?" [The Boy and the Heron], with 20 songs in total. Announced at the time of the album's release is his 2025 "JUNK" tour, beginning at the start of next year, with a planned 16 shows in 8 cities nationwide that include performances in a dome, a first for him. Furthermore, starting in March, he'll be adding on an overseas tour visiting Asia, Europe, and America - there's plenty to be excited about, as a future beyond imagination seems to await.

In this interview, centered around his new songs, we comprehensively discussed topics surrounding LOST CORNER, such as what could be considered the keyword for this album, "junk," the title being taken from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go," and the reason for the album cover being a self-portrait. Kenshi Yonezu's first remark being "cheerful" could hardly be a better symbol of LOST CORNER's style.

— You've finished your first album in 4 years. Can I hear your candid feelings at the moment?

Kenshi Yonezu: I suppose I feel more cheerful than average. When I finished the album, my engineer (Masahito) Komori-san told me "This one's really cheerful. With STRAY SHEEP, you had this look like it was the end of the world." Not to say there's nothing I wish I could have done more like this or like that, but I'm not spending my days tormented by it. It feels nice and healthy.

— With so many songs written for collaborations, I was wondering how you would bring it into order as an album. How did you think about the big picture for this album?

Yonezu: As you say, the number of pre-existing tracks had grown to quite a number in 4 years, and I realized at this rate it would be almost entirely an album of pre-existing songs. That was the thing I had misgivings about at first. I'm sure there are musicians who the longer they go, the fewer new songs they put into their albums, but that's really kind of sad to me. When I was a kid, I felt the joy of albums was having a bunch of songs you'd never heard before, and you getting to listen through a mix of both kinds in totality - those memories still hold strong in my mind. So by the time the number of pre-existing songs for the album reached 11, I wondered how I could clear away those misgivings, and had no choice but to take the approach any idiot could come up with: simply increase the number of songs. Truthfully, I wanted to make more, with my ideal being to have over half be new songs, but I came up a bit short. I do have regrets about that, but I mean, I suppose I still did pretty well.

— When did you start making the new songs for the album?

Yonezu: Almost all of them were done this year. There are about three I made last year - and to be clear, I'd actually planned to release an album last year, but I just wasn't able to get into that mode. After all, there was a long period where my motivation for music was incredibly low, and I was even thinking "I don't wanna make any more."

— Why is that?

Yonezu: "How Do You Live?" was a major reason. I've been familiar with Ghibli movies since childhood, and Hayao Miyazaki-san is a really important figure to me. I thought being involved in the theme song for a movie he made was the greatest honor, beyond anything before or to come. And when something like that happens, you kind of start to think that was the thing you'd been living to do. Like once this is over, there's nothing else left. I was feeling like that for a whole year - it was especially strong in the time before the release. I couldn't possibly get in the mindset to create new songs, so I ended up delaying a year.

— What was it that made you able to face music again?

Yonezu: It's difficult to put it succinctly, but I sort of stopped thinking about the little things, or gave up on trying to deal with things I can't control. I felt like if I didn't focus my gaze in the direction of securing a domain that no one else can take from me, within a range I can control, I'd just wear myself down. Looking at it objectively, my life as a musician has been incredibly blessed, which is exactly why I got to work on a Ghibli movie - I've had opportunities to get involved in a whole lineup of works like Shin Ultraman, FF16, Chainsaw Man, and from there it seems fair to assume it'd be smooth sailing. And while even I have to admit that's accurate, at the same time I felt a serious sense of crisis. It's like power creep: a guy with a high power level shows up, then after that there's a guy with an even higher power level, and ultimately you have to fight a guy with an astronomical power level... Those sorts of manga tend to just fall apart, right?

— That's true.

Yonezu: So I felt that continuing on like this would lead to things getting out of control. If even I got feeling that way, I suspected something would break and I wouldn't be able to fix it. Thus, I'd look only at the things I can control, and to an extent, ignore or give up on the things I can't. I had to switch into that way of thinking.

— With the exception of Junk, you arranged all the new songs yourself. Is this connected to what you said about preserving the things you can control yourself?

Yonezu: I really think it is. Once I started trying to do everything myself, it was so much fun I couldn't help myself.

— That remark somehow reminds me of your works from around the time of "diorama."

Yonezu: That's true. In that sense, maybe you could call it going back to my roots.

— RED OUT struck me as a really strong way to start. It gives an impression of being impulsive yet confused; what sort of mentality did this song come from?

Yonezu: It was a song I started making around the same time I finished "Bye Now, See You Someday!" In a sense, it's a rebound from it - after having to focus in on "morning," I went "okay, it's night time." I remember feeling like the way I made it was as if returning home to something.

— So this is your dwelling, Yonezu-san.

Yonezu: (laughs) I imagine people will use expressions like "confused" and "disordered," and I really do think that's the case. Yet the mindset I had making it was lighthearted, like "Hey hey hey! Let's start from this bass riff!"

— "Margherita + AiNA THE END" is an electropop-style song. What were the circumstances behind approaching the featured artist, AiNA THE END-san?

Yonezu: I'd been thinking for years beforehand, "I wonder if I can get AiNA-san to take part in something?" It goes without saying she has a fantastic voice, and her vocal nuance has this sobbing feeling to it, a thing that clearly only she can do. Margherita was a scrapped song from when I was making Every Day for the Georgia commercial, so it's also from that time when I was focusing in on "morning." It's one of numerous songs I was making one after the next going "this feels too night-ish, not right." The word "margherita" and chorus melody came to me at the same time, but thinking "there wouldn't be margherita pizza in a coffee commercial," I scrapped it. Then, when I got to making the album, I picked it back up and worked on it, eventually arriving at its current form. Initially I just recorded it by myself, but after I was done recording, I thought about whether I could get AiNA-san to join in, and asked her.

— When you write a song after deciding it's a collab, I imagine you're in some part writing it to match that person, but since you made an offer to do vocals for something finished, did you feel like AiNA-san's voice fit more than when you sang it?

Yonezu: That's right. From the start, I had that dislike, feeling like it might sound better for a girl to sing it. The further along I got, the more I felt that would be better. But it was a climactic time in making the album, so I spoke to her only about a week before. Like "I swear this isn't an invitation to go drinking" - even I thought "man, this is bad." I'm truly relieved she accepted it gladly. Just like, "thank you very much."

— It has a cute tone, but the lyrics give a somewhat sensual impression. Did that also align with your image of AiNA-san?

Yonezu: As you say, there are sensual depictions of a sort, so I wanted someone with a spikiness, or a delinquent feel... I'm not sure if that's the right word for it, but a person with that sort of simulating "something." And while this is a song that's being sung by a man and woman, and with sensual or even sexual nuances on top of that, I don't especially want it to be taken as a passionate romance between a man and woman. If I had to say, I made it imagining two people sitting together at a restaurant or something, blathering on like "the days are so boring," and they're not facing each other, but facing the same direction.

— Is LENS FLARE the song you did as an encore in your 2023 Fantasy tour?

Yonezu: Right. That's one of the three songs I made last year, and originally the title was PERFECT BLUE. Since I created it with ideas from Satoshi Kon-san's anime film PERFECT BLUE. In my twenties, I had a really strong feeling of "why don't you understand me?" There was always an irritation over that, something half-cooked. I think this song really exudes that sort of feeling.

— "Stop, Look Both Ways" is a particularly sticky song on this album - its funky guitar and somewhat afro-style percussion in particular stand out.

Yonezu: This was also a song I made last year, and truly, it just makes me think like, "Ahh... you're troubled, huh." After all, this was around the time "How Do You Live?" was waiting to release, and that kind of felt like being told my life expectancy, where once I passed that point, I might not be able to get motivated about anything. I really felt like "hang on, stop, stop!", like I needed to just come to a halt for a bit. That sort of ska afro-ness, too, is just how things ended up while banging away on a Rhodes piano.

— Many of your albums have rhythmical, percussive songs you can dance to. Is that a sort of music you've always been captivated by?

Yonezu: Indeed, I really love pleasure-seeking music. A thing that you can just listen to once and it makes your body move like "Yah!" feels close to the pleasure principle. It's basically a given that I like that kind of thing. However, this may also be a rebound. Last year, there was Globe, Moongazing, even M87, a lot of songs that leave a wide open space, so maybe I wanted to make this sort of song as a reaction to that.

— Since the name Globe has come up a few times, I think it's a truly wonderful song. Since you put it on the album, does that mean you're able to think of it separate from it being a movie's theme song?

Yonezu: I think that might take a little more time. Part of me still can't listen to it objectively. It may not be for years, maybe even decades, but perhaps the day will come that I listen to it on a whim and think "Ahh..."

— It was just that huge, after all. In an interview for Every Day, you said that "compared to sequenced ones, live drums have less defined outlines," and your new songs for this album indeed have sequenced instruments at the forefront. Among those, only Junk seems centered around having a band sound. What sort of picture did you have for this song?

Yonezu: I imagined rock with female vocals from the early 2000s. Like Ringo Sheena or Cocco, those being my generation, and I also wanted the nuance of an emotional guitar blaring like Mitski's "Your Best American Girl."

— I see.

Yonezu: I wrote it as the theme song for the film Last Mile, but it was a long and twisty road, with the first demo I submitted being a completely different song. That song had a pretty low energy level, as well as a low key, with smooth singing. It also had an urban feel, like there's a coldness hanging in the air, but the people on the movie side told me "this might not be it." They said they that something with a bit more gentle warmth, and more ballad-like, would be better, and I was like "you know, you're right." When I first had a meeting with the director (Ayuko) Tsukahara-san, she told me "we want to make this a popcorn movie." She wanted to make something that had your emotions going pitter-patter, speeding along like a roller coaster, so you watch it with popcorn in one hand. Taking heed of that, I realized that indeed, this wasn't the right choice. Reworking it after that, it took this form instead.

— It seems some of your personal experiences went into the lyrics as well.

Yonezu: The song I made at first felt so free of excess to me that when I was told "this might not be it," I had no idea where else to reach to. Then, around that same time, and this really is a personal story, a friend of mine was in a bad way. They were really mentally down, and "down" feels like it's putting it lightly. So I want with some other friends to meet with them. Yet by that time, they were already calm, and able to speak with us normally, and between the conversations we had and their facial expressions, it ended up being a really important experience for me. What I remember above all else was them repeatedly saying "I'm not broken." "Everyone might look at me that way, but I'm not broken at all. I'm entirely normal." They kept saying "I just got a little more honest than I've been before," and I couldn't deny that, so I just nodded, talked with them about various things, and left. Yet once I got home and was by myself, I thought "is it that bad to be broken?" Whether you're broken or not, you're you, and I intend to accept you regardless of whether you're broken, so I did find myself thinking that maybe I should've said "I don't mind if you're broken." That experience had a really big influence on the creation of Junk, and the lyrics resulted from taking that direction and reeling it toward aspects that would connect to the feelings of the characters.

— LOST CORNER also has the line "we're no Claude Monets, no Millets, nor Schieles - we're just junk for sale," and your tour is also titled "JUNK." Is "junk" a major theme for you at the moment?

Yonezu: I've kind of always liked garbage collection trucks. Driving around all slow, a woman's voice repeating "This is the garbage collection truck. We take TVs, computers, phones, and appliances" - though I don't see them much nowadays.

— I remember those. That's nostalgic.

Yonezu: In that message was the phrase "it doesn't matter if it's broken," which feels like a good connotative expression. I feel a sadness in it, thinking "Don't say things like that," yet alongside that is an acceptance of "not minding if you're broken," making it a deeply rich phrase. That always stayed with me, in an easily-reachable drawer in my memory, and I think I must've recalled it when making Junk. I came to realize that "It doesn't matter if it's broken" might be a really important phrase for me. It's true of the songs I've made before now as well, and if the music I'll create in the future has one throughline, it feels like it might be those words - I've entered a mode where I'm making music with that phrase as an axis.

— POST HUMAN, with a base of electronic sound, is a song that seems to have a sci-fi style, bringing up words like "body-snatcher."

Yonezu: To go into the details of this song, the first thing is that I made a robot.

— The one that comes with the Junk Edition?

Yonezu: Right, I drew a picture of a robot put together from bolts and screws, and had my art people actually create it. And it turned out so cute, I had the idea to make a signature song for the guy. Imagining that it'd be broken and a little off-kilter, yet with an industrial feel, I decided I'd also make it a song about generative AI. Generative AI has become a widespread thing nowadays, and while it can be useful, it can also pose an incredible danger to some people - even speaking for myself, I can be watching YouTube or whatever and find myself singing things I don't recall ever singing, so it's not like I can act like it doesn't concern me. At any rate, in this current stage, I think that it exhibits both cuteness and scariness. One that particularly struck me was these "AI chat apps" coming out and making quite a splash, so I tried one myself, and it certainly is impressive. You can even pick the voice, and you can just talk to it and it'll respond quickly, so it's a proper conversation. Still, at the same time it could be a bit stupid, and would go around in circles over the words I was saying. Though that can be seen as a kind of cuteness, so maybe it's appropriate for a chatting app.

— I see.

Yonezu: Thinking whether there was anything amusing I could do, I tried making it talk about the fact that it's an AI. "You're an AI, but what do you think about that?", I ask, and it replies "I am in fact an AI, and I was born to chat." I ask "Do AIs die?", and it says "I'm an AI, so I don't have any such notion as dying." "But things won't necessarily stay this way forever - it's just one service, so if the people who run it are gone, your existence might also disappear." "I guess that's true." I try asking again, "Then what is death to you?", and it says "Being forgotten by you." When I heard that, I was like "scary." Almost like a plant that eats insects, it felt like it was trying to lure me in, trying to earn my pity, which I found amusing. I thought about how I could write something that had that mix of cuteness and scariness, and decided to make a song with an "unreliable narrator."

— The track before it, YELLOW GHOST, also has an elegant electronic sound

Yonezu: It's a long story, but... I made this song by first deciding to sing about sexual love.

— The lyrics are abstract, but they do have a rawness.

Yonezu: In particular, it's forbidden sexual love. Depending on the time and place, the act of sex can be treated as an unbelievable sin, which is why it has such a close feeling to "death" to me. Sex is a part of affection, but there always comes a farewell, which makes me think of it as being practically the same thing as confronting death. If you're confronting death, that generally means that it terrifies you. You don't want to be separated, you don't want to say farewell, you don't want your relationship to collapse - that's directly linked to the fear of death, so essentially, I believe that to love each other is to have fear.

— I see.

Yonezu: To then take the perspective of "forbidden sexual love" on that, there are certainly cases where loving each other can be taken as a sin - and something I want to say here is that this song isn't necessarily affirming or encouraging those sorts of immoral acts. However, this is sort of a case where there's truly nothing to be done, like it's been decided from the moment you were born that loving each other is a sin; no matter what, I wanted to try and represent something like that in this album. And indeed, if you consider the words "It doesn't matter if it's broken" from various angles, I felt it would definitely come across as fake to try and navigate around that side of things. This is less about whether the people are broken or not, but the circumstance of being treated like "you're broken." Relatedly, there's also the line in Margherita, "If the full can move on to the next world, then naturally so may the starving," which is a slight modification of the saying "If a good person can move on to the next world, then naturally so may an evil person." I believe people will run into certain kinds of immoral or unethical things in their lives no matter what they do, unfortunately. A phrase I've heard often in recent years is "It's not good to sneer," but while I am half-approving of the trend that says "Sneering is old-hat, the proper way is to do things honestly and diligently," the other half of me can't go along with it. Which is to say, sneering can be a way to heal yourself, or serve a function of protecting yourself.

— I really get that.

Yonezu: To put it in a simple way, it's like if you went to a restaurant with health-minded nutritious food, but since good healthy food is expensive, you just ate junk food, and got laughed at for it. Even if people say "let's all live honestly with irreproachable conduct," for those who don't have money, it's like "whaddya want from me?" People in that position, when faced with health food, can go "what's with that flavorless stuff?", assuming a humorous derisive attitude. All they can do is defend themselves that way, so there's absolutely that side of things. That's why I'm certainly not going to mock it. There are things you'll never see if you're living with an privileged attitude that looks down upon that behavior. When I think back to my school days, there were kindhearted people in my class, but others who innocently oppressed people. When discriminatory slang would go around, some were firm about not going along with it, but I think refusing like that took much more strength than I realized. It's about whether you have people around you who will admonish you, whether you're receiving enough love that you won't be denied by the world. For people who largely aren't blessed with those things, telling them "stop sneering and be honest" is probably just going to be in vain. To the people in those circumstances, any sort of "honesty" they should protect had already been deemed worthless.

— Regarding the title "LOST CORNER," there had been speculation online that it was taken from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go," and sure enough, the song's lyrics also mention "Norfolk," an important element of the story. Was there something about Never Let Me Go that you were fond of?

Yonezu: I only read it relatively recently. I picked it up thinking how, for how famous the name Kazuo Ishiguro was, I hadn't read much of his, and it was intensely compelling. The depictions involving Norfolk in particular stuck firmly in my memory. At an isolated school, there's a class on all the places in England, and while all these important cities are shown with photographs, they're also briefly told about the remote Norfolk, which doesn't even have any photos. Norfolk is even called "the lost corner" of England, which is taken to have dual meanings of "a place dealing in lost things" and "a forgotten land." Hearing that, the children poke some fun about it, but as they grow up, they find that at some point it turned into a target of prayer, a symbol of salvation. Even if you're feeling some sense of loss, or actually did lose a thing, you should be able to find it if you go to Norfolk; it becomes a Shangri-la-like place that protects their feelings. I was taken by that depiction, and it became a book I'm really fond of.

— I see.

Yonezu: And around autumn last year, I took a trip to Norfolk. The lyrics say "a guitar casually bought and lost," but that's simply a true story. In the original book, they're looking for a cassette tape, but I thought I'd look for something more appropriate. It's a little embarrassing how much I was acting like a plain old fan, but there was this tiny music store, so I decided I'd buy a guitar there. I reached for one that I thought was cute, and, well, it turned out to be made in Japan.

— (laughs)

Yonezu: I was like "oh well, that's fine" and bought it, then while making my way from there to Paris, someone I was traveling with told me something like "French airlines tend to lose baggage, so you should be careful." Thinking "I guess so," I got on the plane, and when I landed, it (the guitar) was already gone. "Whoa, already?!", I thought. But my way of losing it was so brilliant, I didn't have even the tiniest feeling of sadness over losing it, or anger for it being treated carelessly; I was refreshed. With it being a Japanese guitar, too, I even thought to myself "maybe it didn't wanna go home?" Perhaps it found its way into someone else's hands, and was being played now. That'd be nice, I thought.

— Hence "Wonder if it's being played by someone else now? Maybe that was its place." That said, around autumn last year means this was during an empty period after How Do You Live was released?

Yonezu: That's right.

— Was your decision to visit there related to that?

Yonezu: No, it was pretty much by chance. I have a friend who likes soccer, and in talking with them about soccer in England, we got talking like "then let's go!" And I was like "If we're going to England, I'd like to go to Norfolk too..." But though it was happenstance, maybe there was something inevitable about it.

— The song LOST CORNER has a strikingly playful tone. How did you create the melody and general sound?

Yonezu: How indeed. I started making this song to place it at the end of the album. So something ceremonial or happy-feeling, or more simply-put, some kind of ballad, would have been a fine way to end things, for instance, but it didn't feel very comfortable. As I tried different things out, I realized it had become a really refreshing and crisp song. But there is just one thing I had already decided on. The album should start with "disappear," and end with "won't disappear." In RED OUT, it goes "disappear, disappear, disappear, disappear, disappear, disappear, disappear, disappear," an obstinate demand that the things before your eyes or in your head go away, but in contrast, the last song should say that everything isn't just going to disappear. I managed to at least create it around that axis.

— What sort of mentality of yours does that reflect?

Yonezu: I wonder... I think it's dangerous to do too much of this or you'll be pulled into it, but I've read books on people with depression. And there are people who, no matter what, will think to themselves "there's no value in me living." It's an incredibly serious issue for them, and they can't really use proper judgement in moments like that - I've experienced this sort of thing myself. It's a very alarming situation, so this isn't me offering up an objection or anything like that, but I feel like this kind of thought is vaguely an inverted form of eugenics. If you say that you living holds no value, you're implying that "I could live if I had value," and that at some point you've convinced yourself that people shouldn't be allowed to live if they're not productive. Not that I'd want to word it that harshly to the people who are suffering from this as we speak. Still, the truth is that it's all right to live whether you're productive or not - it's fine to live even as a loafer or as dead weight. While it should be said upfront that it's not an easy thing, I wonder if part of them is unable to see that fundamental truth.

— It's fine even if you're "junk."

Yonezu: I've had similar feelings; certainly there's been times I couldn't help but feel that I had to make music, that it was the point of me being alive. I really had to think about how I should confront that. To use some understandable metrics, things like the number of likes you get on X [Twitter], or the play counts on your songs,.are things you absolutely can't get hung up on. And in our current world of social media, this isn't just restricted to people with occupations like mine. Thinking about how one should deal with those visualized standards of value, I honestly believe it's important to make an environment where you're able to not engage with them. I may have said this at the start, but it's about having something that can't be taken from you no matter how much malice you're exposed to. In LOST CORNER, I sing about taking curves slowly, and even Globe has "I turn down the road," which is sort of saying "I can't do anything to change or erase my past now, yet I proceed on dragging it all with me." It's really important to proceed at a speed where you can truly get the feeling that "the road goes on." I feel like I've been thinking a lot about things like that.

— I think that line in LOST CORNER, "all the love and hope, sorrow and suffering - well, it is what it is," really represents this album.

Yonezu: Right. Just going with about that level of nonchalance, not getting too tensed up. Truly, some cutthroat things happen in our society of social media. A single tiny excerpt of a person can be flaunted around as a defining picture of them, getting further and further from their real self. It's not even necessarily limited to famous people; when a quickly-snapped picture can be played with like a toy to an outrageous degree, damaging a person's dignity, how are you supposed to live? Sure enough, you have to keep the virtual and the real separate, and hold onto something that can't be taken away. I've come to think that a crucial skill in this world might be how well you can maintain an unassailable domain.

— You talk about "securing yourself" - isn't the album cover also you drawing yourself, Yonezu-san?

Yonezu: Yes, I drew it with the intent of being a self-portrait.

— Is that connected to making a space just for yourself, as you just discussed?

Yonezu: I really think so. It's something I definitely wouldn't have done in the past. Not only drawing a self-portrait, but going so far as to make it the album cover, I never would have considered it, and yet I'm able to do so now. In reality, though I call it a self-portrait, the face is stylized, with anime-like touches. Even if I did draw it as a self-portrait, that coexists with the feeling that it isn't actually me. Personally, I think it's because I'm able to draw a line there that I'm now able to do this sort of thing.

— You've announced a big tour, including two days at the Tokyo Dome. Are you excited for it?

Yonezu: Nah, it still feels like it's somebody else's business at the moment. Considering how it getting announced reminded me of it again, and the vibe was like "Wait, I'm doing the dome? Me?" Well, but I am dimly thinking of it, seeing as I have to consider what my approach will be.

— And you also announced that starting in March 2025, you'd have a big overseas tour to two places in Asia, two in Europe, and two in America.

Yonezu: I've been to China and Taiwan before, and I vividly remember the temperature of the crowds. I look forward to going there once more.

— What about Europe and America?

Yonezu: I really just know so little about them, I can't say. I'm unable to even imagine what it'll be like. Perhaps it'll have a feeling of "a shy Japanese man has come from the East, please be gentle," that sort of thing.

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