Lyric

Tanakajiken 3rd Album
Artwork by ARUNA

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Be quiet. Listen closely.

Poems that were already enjoyable to read have been set to music and seem to have begun swimming alongside the guest musicians.

Tamaki Usako / Singer-Songwriter

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Liner Notes: Same Title, Different Poems / Vol. 1

After releasing my second album, Folklore of Circulating Life, in May 2021, I began making the compilation book This Strange World Map around July. Despite COVID-19, I was playing plenty of shows by then, apart from a period when a certain brain hemorrhage forced me to cut back.

Still, I couldn't fit all 26 songs from two albums into my live shows. I still can't. After two albums under one name, you have so many songs to perform that writing new ones slows down. Klagenicole, Mice Wet Shoes, and Klagitz all stopped after two releases.

In March 2022, a year after my last recording sessions, I thought: if I don't have the energy to write songs, why not just write poems? Given a poem, I can usually make a song. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes years.

So I recruited some people and created an impromptu poetry website, Same Title, Different Poems. Seven people would take turns writing poems under the same title over seven weeks, with weekly deadlines.

The participants were Tanakajiken, K-yota from Doi Science, Tamaki Usako, Nishijimao, Umiyuki, Taro Kijiuma, and Takuya Hayashida. All but Umiyuki had joined the World Map Project. He had wanted to join too, but had withdrawn because of the deadline, so I was glad he could take part this time.

Writing poetry is fun. You need to revise, but until publication or release, you can rewrite as much as you like.

Sharing a title among several writers was an interesting experiment. I think that was the project's defining feature. Sharing a title is not the same as sharing a theme. Given a title like As a Singer-Songwriter's Boyfriend, I had no such experience, so I had to invent a story. That was fun too.

Everyone had to stretch a little to write these poems. Not unwillingly, of course, but deadlines sometimes produce rushed work, which can lead to surprisingly interesting results.

The poems ended up different from my usual songs. Sometimes I thought, "Who the hell would want to sing this?" Yet these are my songs. That distance is amusing, but also uncomfortable. It took me about a year to set them to music because it's hard to compose for words you can't easily identify with.

Now it's time to make the first round of Same Title, Different Poems into an album. Once recording is done, I'd like to begin the second round.

April 15, 2023
Tanakajiken