The Thoughts and Feelings Became “Music” during Dubbing and Recording— The Kessoku Band's album reached No. 1 on the Oricon music charts and is being played on a lot of music streaming services . What do you think of this album from the listeners' point of view?Aoyama/Mizuno: It's great (laughs).
Aoyama: Seriously, it's great. The production team's unparalleled confidence can be felt by the performers. Once you raise the bar to chase the quality of the music, it's hard to lower it, so I wasn't sure if I could perform this much anymore again. Now I feel I could have played even better. This album is still very good even without the category of just anime songs.
Mizuno: I play the role of Ryo and contribute to the chorus of most of the songs, and I listened to Ms. Hasegawa's vocals recorded in advance for each recording. I tried to accentuate the phrases of the songs as much as I could to Hasegawa's. Ms. Hasegawa puts a lot of feeling into her recordings, so I listened to her singing carefully each time and sang the chorus to match her feelings. The song, “Flashbacker" had a slower tempo.
Aoyama: So you channeled Ryo. That's cool. I want to listen to it again right now.
— You played the guitar and recorded the vocals like real rock bands!Mizuno: Yes (laughs). The vocals were sung live, not mixed. Ms. Ikumi (Hasegawa) is very good at it.
Aoyama: Her vocals are so powerful.
Mizuno: It's amazing, isn't it? Really.
Aoyama: I only sang "Rolling Rock, Morning Falls for You," so I had no idea what the other 13 songs on the album were like or how they would come together. It was only during the recording session that I learned that the song "That band" sounds like that. And I realized the song, "If I could be a constellation" is such a great song! It was a fresh and fun experience for me to know them as just a single listener.
Mizuno: I got to listen to the songs ahead of the others.
Aoyama: I am envious. It seems that the songwriting started 2 to 3 years ago. I can't keep such great songs quiet for 2 to 3 years if I could make them.
Mizuno: Indeed (laughs).
Aoyama: I would definitely want to tell people at my own personal live performances if I had written such a song. Everyone is amazing, and I think Ikumi Hasegawa is brilliant!
— Aoyama-san and Mizuno-san, you played the characters as songwriting members in this animation, right?Aoyama: That's right. When I look at the lyrics of this album, I feel that Bocchi-chan is the one who wrote them. The actual lyrics were written by ZAQ and Ai Higuchi, but they wrote those songs as how Bocchi chan would create the music. So Bocchi-chan’s character is shaped by several different people. This band is singing the words that the characters would have written, not the words that someone else wrote. That’s something only a rock band can do. Playing original music for the animation is already very valuable, but it additionally makes it wonderful that the songs themselves are really good. People appreciate songs as is. Oh, I’m getting so emotional….
Mizuno: (laughs).
Aoyama: I cannot really put it into words. I really think it's really great.
Photo by Mitsuru Nishimura
Photo by Mitsuru Nishimura—Don’t you feel that the lyrics written by the various songwriters and the backstory of the Kessoku Band help to shape Bocchi-chan's character clearly? Aoyama: I think so. Especially the songs performed in the last episode ("Wasurenai Yaranai" and "Seiza ni Naru Naritareta"), I was more enthusiastic about the acting when I imagined to whom she was writing the songs. For example, I wondered if this song was written for Kita-chan, or imagined as if Ryo-san could have given her some opinions about music that Bocchi chan created. Or Nijika-chan is like a maternal character in this animation. I wonder how this song can be sung if the song was written for Nijika-chan, not for Kita-chan. I can imagine forever what the animation would be like. I hope our fans could enjoy imagining this animation’s backstories like I did. I enjoyed this kind of thinking during the recording sessions the whole time, and now I’m really happy that I saw some comments or reviews about the animation which were discussing about the ideas of the backstory and/or imagination of the situation setting.
— Mizuno-san, You are the vocalist for "Karakara," but the lyrics and music were written by Ikkyu Nakajima of “tricot”, right?Mizuno: Yes. The first song I received was a tentative version sung by Ikkyu, it was supposed to be “tentative” but it was already kind of completed when I heard(laughs). I tried to sing it as close as possible to Ikkyu's style, the slightly laidback feeling matched the personality of the character, Ryo. and the lyrics also have deep meaning.Like Yoshino (Aoyama)-san mentioned earlier, (to sing like the character) , I thought a lot about what it would be like if Ryo sang was this song for Nijika. I sang the song while thinking about it. I really like the phrase "I have to use up this life I'm borrowing". Ryo is ambiguous and elusive, but she has a lot of conviction toward her band. I sang this song thinking that Ryo-san knows how everyone in her band is thinking, including Nijika’s dream. The part before the chorus is different between the first and the second, and so I put the emotion into the song a little differently. I would be very happy if you could notice these small details.
— “tricot” also tweeted about this song on X (formerly “Twitter”), didn't they?Aoyama: They also posted a video of the song, didn't they?
Mizuno: It was a self-cover. It made me happy.
