1. Tegami
- The beginning of this song is from a letter I wrote as a teenager addressed to myself at 30. On my 30th birthday, my mother gave that letter to me. As I tried to read it, I vividly recalled the troubles and pain of that time. I longed to write a reply to my teenage self and went to my piano. This song, written for the NHK Choir Concours, was sung by so many people, and so many chance meetings and relationships were born through this one song.
2. Knockin' On Heaven's Door
- To sing a cover of this Bob Dylan song in English is so sad, so I tried to write new lyrics. The song is the theme song for the movie "Heaven's Door" and the theme of the lyrics is "death." When the main character comes to accept the fate called "death," he can understand what it means to live, and can embrace those emotions.
3. ANSWER
- When you can't express the truth in the feeling of love, and you are able to say that you can't say it, you find the answer staring you in the face. The people you love, your "friends" and "lovers," you realize that showing gratitude to these people means that the essential things called love are simply "sorry" and "thank you." This song expresses just that.
4. Somebody Stop Me
- In accordance with the title, when you find that you can't control yourself, you just want to say, "Somebody stop me." This song is about the annoyance you feel when something is right and you've made a mistake, and you can't separate yourself from the conclusion that's been made via the circumstances. I think that when you find that you can't go on, the part of life that you experience is yet another type of answer.
5. Dahlia
- This is a song about the first time you live together with someone, and the memories of the person you had decided to live with. I think that love, no matter what kind it is, presents a "symbol." For example, the movie you saw together, or the music you listened to that was given as a present. For me, my boyfriend bought me a red dahlia in a pot. Our love eventually faded; at first, going through the break up was very difficult, and I couldn't bear to look at the dahlia. But time passed, and now the dahlia is the flower that I associate with my memories of my first love.
6. Final Destination
- What constitutes a "final destination" is different for everyone. You run towards that dream, setting the people you love as your goal, with only them in mind. But sometimes you become too focused on that goal, with far too much tenacity, and fight for something that you can't even see anymore. This is a song about when that happens; face yourself, and you'll check what you're running towards, and understand what it is that you hold dear.
7. Our Story
- This is a song about comparing amongst ourselves the story called "Life" when we find that it doesn't always end with a happy ending. Fairy tales end peacefully, but our everyday lives continue on rather steadily. The song reminds you why you hang in there as you wait, relying on the wariness that you acquire through living.
8. Tasogare
- This song is about the same mistakes that the main character of the story makes over and over. When she makes the same mistakes over and over again, I think that it means that she can't let go of the past. Until now, I've been able to meet new people on new paths, and eventually, the case of creating the different face of "the past self" happens several times. It's not just one time, but also two times and three times and the same mistakes keep intruding... this is the answer I was looking for while making "Tasogare."
9. We're All Alone
- I was able to interpret Boz Scagg's "We're All Alone" through the key concepts "only together" and "everyone's solitude." From these two interpretations in English, the original Japanese lyrics I wrote used the following idea: "Mankind is lonely, so therefore we can share with each other the attempts to overcome this loneliness, and can love."
10. Reflection
- When people hear "a reflection is the projection of sameness in the mirror," I think that the reaction is usually "Oh, really?" It's a good meaning of reflection, but the real meaning that they don't admit to is that when there's a reflection, you see both sides.
11. Requiem
- In the middle of recording this album, my gradnfather died. I had sat at my piano to write a song dedicated to him. Realizing that it was already too late, I said that it was good to have this time to live. We don't know what day our lives will end, so I put into this song the feelings of thanks we carry around in our lives that we say to those who mean the most to us. It's a little less than 11 minutes long, but up until now, out of all of the songs I've written, this is the one that I feel is the best.
12. Black Glasses
- Ben Folds, whom I respect and admire very much, gave me the chance to write a song with him. Together we went to a coffee shop and said, "What are we going to write about?" In agreement, we decided, "We'll write about our common feature!" And so, we arrived at this song after a bit of a struggle. Our common feature is our black thick-rimmed glasses. We expressed it as if people were wearing these glasses as a mask.
13. Fighter
- "There's a fighter in you, there's a fighter in me, there's a fighter in all of us." It was simply easy to understand this message in a song. I was completely lost with the arrangement, but putting in the reverse of the piano while using the assertion of the synthesizer led to the song with the most extreme feeling on the album.