Many thanks to Takkun for the summary! This is part one of a two-part interview by Hot Express, the second part of which will be published on by the end of August.

Summary:

Kanno had been doing commercials for 4-5 years (periodically games as well) when she did Macross Plus. She was unfamiliar with anime and the series, so if she knew more her approach might have been different.

Kanno didn’t have a TV or record player growing up, and she didn’t listen to the radio either. She had no entertainment experience until she entered college. In college she joined a band to help out with a band contest because she could play the piano. They won and it became a CD. She was able to gain more experience because of it.

When she was 2 1/2 , she was already writing music, probably she could put feelings that couldn’t be expressed in words, into music. When she gets commercial requests, the sponsors tell her they want to show the product as such, and she acts as a “translator” since she feels it’s easier to express herself in music than words. She’s wanted to write a novel (still does), but because she can’t put her ideas into words, she writes music.

The interviewer asks her if she’s felt a limit on what she can express in music. She feels if there was, she would have quit the music business, but music is a universal language (unlike words) and if you can play, you can get along with anyone. She’s so glad she’s a musician.

Kanno is asked about the album “CM Yoko” and how she chose the songs. Regardings commercial music, it’s disposable and gets old. For the CD, she wanted to choose songs that didn’t have a strong impact or were noisy. But she chose those with a good bio-rhythm, and were light and cute.

CM Yoko is pop and colorful, which is bad for the body. It’s like attacking with jelly beans, a sweetness that you don’t want to eat every day, but for a change of mood would be nice.

The interviewer says that he plays it on his iPod in shuffle mood, and she thinks it’s a good idea, mixing “something small and stupid” in with something spicier.

She’s asked about “Cowboy Bebop” and how she doesn’t really care for jazz, and how wondrous it is she created the soundtrack. She thinks jazz is long and repetitive and doesn’t really get what’s good about it. She’s asked Watanabe (Bebop Director) about what’s good about jazz, but everyone gives different answers. For her, jazz is probably something amazing, but she’ll never understand it. When she created the music, she thought about music that the musicians would enjoy playing.

When she’s making music, she has a lot of dreams in her head. A world appears and that sound goes like this, and music plays in her head and she thinks “How lovely!” She’s always danced to music in her head since she was a child, and when she was happy with it, she would try to write it down, but gave up. It never came out like in her head.

Of course there are songs that have come out better than she expected, but her dreams are larger. Over the years, she’s tried her best to express it in words, but hasn’t been able to, although she feels that little by little she’s been able to.

Regarding the amount of time she has from clients to write a CM song, having a lot of time doesn’t necessarily make a better song. Songs that just flow freely without stress leave the best impression, and she usually makes good work for clients in a hurry. Could be because there’s no time and she needs to gather people quickly, so there’s no time for disagreements.

Kanno is asked if some requests from clients have caused her trouble, and there have been a lot of times. Everyone wants different things, so the scope increases, like “the president likes piano songs..” However, she likes impossible selfish requests.

Kanno like when things get tough, it gets her all excited when things don’t go right, like when there’s an outage during a concert or if a talent’s shoe comes off.

Regarding Turn A Gundam and Tomino, she realizes he’s a word man, not believing in the power of music. He only believes in the power of his words, so at first she felt at a loss, but when she realized he didn’t believed in the power of music or pictures, she was OK.

Regarding anime versus live action, and the different approaches between the two, she feels that they’re both becoming close to each other, but in live action the script can change based on the performance of the actors. In anime, it’s pretty set in stone, even if the storyboards increase or decrease.

In anime and movies, she tries her best to show the world that the director and producers want to show, but CMs aren’t different. Each director is different, but they want to show a different world with their merchandise. Behind the desire to sell a product, she tries to support their idea of “I want to show humans,” I want to just do something beautiful,” or “Something new.”

Part Two will focus on Macross Frontier, the lyrics, concert, and something special.

So, she didn’t have TV, players, and radio at home?! That second paragraph reminded me of this Yamaha vinyl that had a performer named “Yoko Kanno”, and the YKDB members were trying to find out whether or not it’s our Yoko in that record.

The jelly beans comment was funny, comparing music with jelly beans! And the part where she talked about performances getting tough, and then talks about the talent’s shoe coming off… hahaha

Related Articles:

• Hot Express Yoko Kanno Special Long Interview
• Newtype Yoko Kanno and Shoji Kawamori Macross F OST 1 Interview Translation
• CMYoko Interview Translation
• Nifty Darker than Black Interview Translation
• New Yoko Kanno Interview for CMYoko
• Oban Star Racers Director Comments on Kanno
• New Yoko Kanno Interview from Creators' Station (update 2!)
• Yoko Kanno Production IG Interview Part 3
• Darker than Black Yoko Kanno Interview
• Yoko Kanno Production IG Interview Part 2

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Yoko Kanno News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.