INDEX
How have the changes in activities and environment affected the band and their work?
-Nakano：I guess it is difficult to be an independent artist and a major label artist, isn’t it?
Nakano: Nakano：It is hard to keep beating our own asses like Emerald does. If something goes wrong with us, I think we would sink immediately without being able to recover. We have been doing it for about 10 years on a very small raft, rowing ourselves even on days when the wind is not blowing (……).
But I have a real sense that there are people who listen to us, and I can do my best because I have the hope that one day I will meet those people and they will come to our live shows. What I do is very simple: work, child-rearing, and music.
-How do you balance these three things?
Nakano: If you ask me if I have a good balance, I may not have a good balance, and I may have already broken down. Maybe people think I have a good balance, but I have been doing music for 10 years. ……
Fujii: It’s hard to find a balance, isn’t it? There are moments when all the members go bad, and when I get paralyzed and crazy, I can’t even listen to music. As long as we are doing DIY, it is the same as the band dying if we don’t work on it, so it is both interesting and difficult to do it by ourselves. So, I think each of us feels stress differently.
-Nakano：Did these activities and changes in the environment have an impact on your lyrics?
Nakano: I decided not to show the hardships behind the scenes in my lyrics. Even if the lyrics start from a negative point, I want to make them positive and transform them into lyrics that can be received in various ways depending on the listener. I’ve been doing this for about five years since Emerald started, and it’s been a strange life. It’s a strange life.
Fujii: I think all six members of Emerald have had strange lives (laughs). (laughs) But in the midst of it all, we have experienced great blessings, and that’s why it’s so strange. It’s a strange life, for better or worse.
Nakano: Has your language changed, Isono-kun?
Isono-kun: At first, I didn’t have anything in particular that I wanted to convey through music. But as I continued to publicly talk about being in a band while working as an office worker, more and more people came to know about my situation and started to listen to my music, comparing it to their own. I realized that there was another way to communicate.
Looking back, I myself fell in love with Mr. Mineta of Ginko Boyz when I was in junior high and high school, and the more I read his blog and learned about his personality, the more the way I listened to and received his music changed. So when I became a major musician, I began to write more and more, imagining the person who would deliver the words properly, since I might not even know their face, and even people overseas might be listening to my music.
Nakano: Yes, that is a big change.
Isono-kun: But lately, I’ve been told too many times that I’m “there for you” or “a friend to businessmen,” and I don’t like that either (laughs). I don’t want to be a man who is just nice to people.” I think that is punk or a chuuni-sickness, but I want to be twisted somewhere. So there was a time when we intentionally wanted to make strange songs, and “Taste”, which came out last year, is rather that kind of work.
Fujii: I was thinking that very much! I thought there was something strange about it.
Kiichi: I wanted to arrange the song while keeping the same tension in the chorus, so I spent a whole day just working on it. It was from “Taste” that we all started to think more together in this way. Shingo, the bass player, was originally a melodic punk bass vocalist, so he didn’t have the concept of rests at first (laughs), but he started to experiment with various things in his own way, and I think the way we present the music live has also changed.
Isono: Around that time, we had a fight. Isono-kun: Around that time, we had a fight, or rather, I asked myself, “Is it OK as it is? As I mentioned earlier, one of our managers quit before we started working on “Taste for Taste. YONA YONA WEEKENDERS was originally started as a band to relieve my stress, and I basically wrote the songs and lyrics, but when we all got together before the release of “Kosokusei,” we each developed a sense of responsibility, and opinions like “I want to do this more” started to emerge. I am still making the bass guitar. I still play the bass guitar, but recently there have been more and more songs that have changed in ways I had not imagined.
