Jamie: this song is my baby so i can start it by spilling my heart out for a bit.

when you spend so long looking up to people, you start to orient yourself around that view.

i've spent much of these files so far talking about other artists that inspire me, other music i've lifted ideas from, and that's no mistake or coincidence. i make music because i love music, in all its wildly different forms and expressions, and i love the process of creating it - performing with your fellow creatives, feeling lower frequencies of sound thump in your chest, slaving over staves of sheet music or a notebook and piano or a digital audio workstation. it is enthralling to me. i try very hard to be measured and practical about much of it, because i try to prioritize material concerns in general, but when the music crescendoes, when those feelings well up in my full-to-bursting heart… it really does feel like magic.

all this is to say, i look up a lot.

lately, though, it's felt like the world has been spinning around us.

Vane: when I was doing my undergraduate studies in music, I was so stressed and burnt out I was kind of actually dying. I remember one of the vocal performance majors had noticed how stressed and was talking to me. It was a sunny spring afternoon, so she pulled me outside and just had me sit outside with the birds and the wind to try to decompress. And for five minutes, I just sat there taking in the scene with her just existing in the moment. I think a lot about that moment, and I think I’ve come to associate it a lot with clover. I think it’s always good to take a moment to smell the roses so you remember why you’re in love with your art.

Jamie: and it's easier to forget than you might think it is! so much of being an artist is work, and like any work, doing it constantly fucking sucks. you get caught up in your own world, you start obsessing over the quality and presentation of it, and before you even realize, you lose sight of the joy it brought you - in your darker moments, it can feel like you've lost the spark entirely.

rice: "life imitates art".... this is something yuzu (the main MV artist) (hi yuzu we love you) said early on in the MV process. if you've lost sight of what makes you love art, it can be really easy for that to reflect into your life.

(by the way, this is also why the MV has direct references to classical art and paintings all throughout… i wonder if anyone has found them all yet!!!)

Jamie: the spark is still there, though - it can always be found again. it's the reason that a golden sunrise or the view from a hilltop still moves us; it's in the shades of autumn leaves, in the smell of seabreeze; it's what makes art matter to us. life imitates art and art imitates life because art is life!

in many ways, this song is our love letter to change and progress - a rejection of stagnation, a message of love to the possibilities of the future - but at the same time, it's a love letter to the past. maybe that seems counterintuitive - didn't we write a song about how harmful a focus on the past can be?

…well, the past is easy to get caught up in. our records and memories of it are often deeply flawed, prettier in pictures than they were in reality. at the same time, though, our past is what makes us who we are, and if we let it be what it's meant to be, it can be a template with which to face what is yet to come.

this, too, is what art is - a record of the past, and a vision of the future. it's a little piece of the spark to take with you.

rice: the secret is that all artists, all creators, are made up of those sparks, those pieces. artists are just those little pieces all dressed up in a trenchcoat. we put two of our own on display for you in this song, even!!

Jamie: this song is a tribute to the art that made us who we are in general, but there are two songs by two artists in particular that mean the world to us, that we very deliberately put little pieces of in this song.

the first of those is Metronome, by CircusP

Vane: I’ve been following Circus’s work since I was a kid and his work has always been a huge source of inspiration for me. Like, whoa this is just some guy making stuff in his bedroom? And he’s making Miku and Luka sing to this awesome music?? Whoa…”Circus Monster” genuinely went platinum in my house, really sorry to my family who absolutely heard it way more than they wanted to. My other favorite for a long time was “Last of Me”. I thought the production and composition was so cool, the lead melody still gets stuck in my head even years later!! I  think the song that solidified me as a fan though was “Goodbye”. I think that was one of the first few times I genuinely felt very seen by a piece of art when it came to my mental health. I think it’s also what made me realize that making this type of music can connect you with other people on a very profound level. Circus’s music has influenced me in such a monumental way, I’m genuinely so happy I found his music. Then through divine intervention (ricedeity put us in a GC) we became besties.

rice: hi

Vane; it was honestly kind of surreal at first, but he really is just a guy! And that guy is genuinely so lovely!! It also made me realize just how small and interconnected the world really is. When you think about it, I was just a kid listening to another kid make music on the internet. And I think that’s kind of cool to look back on.

Circus has made a lot of fantastic songs, but I think my favorite songs are from uis album CMYK. (Rice directed this album also btw).

rice: hi

Vane: It’s hard to pick a favorite (because Marco Polo and Right as Rain are soooooo good) but Metronome genuinely might be my favorite Vocaloid song from CMYK, and maybe my favorite Vocaloid song Ever. I think about the song and its meaning so often, and it always manages to make me misty eyed. It’s a beautiful ending to CMYK and is such a beautiful homage to creation and being a creator as a whole. I love this bit of verse 2 and the chorus so so much.

I don't think I’ve told him to his face plainly, but Circus I hope you know how much your work means to me. I am only here because you walked the road before us, and now we have a path to follow. Thank you for walking the road.

Listen to CMYK. Whether you’re a longtime vocaloid fan but haven’t listened to CMYK or a new to Vocaloid in general, it’s genuinely life changing.

Jamie: the second little piece… is Cheerleader, by Porter Robinson.

Porter Robinson has been one of my favorite musicians and biggest inspirations for over a decade now. i was there when Sad Machine first came out - a major western artist using a vocal synth at a time when vocaloid culture was still decidedly a niche within a niche here - and i've been in love ever since. when he and Madeon came to my city during their Shelter tour, i was in the front row sobbing my fucking eyes out to Goodbye to a World. many years later, when Nurture came out, i was in the midst of a years-long period of creative burnout, at times convinced i would never make music again, and that album helped me realize i wanted nothing more than the exact opposite. then, after finishing my second album made after reigniting that beautiful spark, he came by once more on tour for his album SMILE :D, and i spent three straight hours sobbing my eyes out once again (starting at Year of the Cup and lasting until an hour after the concert).

his music means the world to me. it is heartfelt, spellbinding, idiosyncratic; it so often puts into words feelings i struggle to articulate; it is something comforting in a world that is often anything but.

and then, on a random tuesday, Porter's manager fucking emailed me asking me to tune miku for an official cover of Cheerleader.

…reckoning with that was hard, especially in the wake of him releasing an album that in many ways is about how difficult being in his position is. part of me feels the need to couch my feelings here, because at the end of the day, i don't want to overly idolize him - Porter Robinson is a fellow person who is flawed like any other.

but… he's made beautiful things that remind me why i do what i do, and that means the world to me.

and i guess at some point i started making things that mean that much to other people too.

rice: i love you jamie

Vane: i love you jamie

Jamie: i fucking love you both so much and every day i thank the heavens that you became a part of my life. i started crying in the middle of writing all this and now i need to switch the tone up really quickly. Other than this song obviously dealing with the same inspiration/follower sort of dynamic as Cheerleader (with a far different tone, of course, but still) i also watched a production breakdown video Porter did where for a brief bit he showed the patch settings for the lead synth in that song and i genuinely just copied that preset one-for-one for the post-chorus lead. Vane wrote the melody for it too so i basically didn't do anything to the lead except copy down a preset

it's a good lead what can i s- wait hold on okay i need to take a sidebar real quick completely unrelated to the song. we're writing these in google docs and the link for that video, which is the correct link and goes to the production breakdown video, is showing up as this for some fucking reason

My Wife Took Everything

rice: this is album 3

vane: this is album 3

Jamie: me and the boys when there's divorce at the function

rice: how are we going to bring this back UHHHHHHH so sometimes when artists stop doing the work that they got discovered for it is kind of like a divorce (looking at the studio audience for approval) ???? ? ? ? ? ???? ? ?? ???

Vane: I think that’s rihgt

Jamie: well, you see, just like divorce(?????????), i feel like it's easy to get caught up on nostalgia, drowning in a misremembered past instead of looking to the future… if anything can come of "Clover", my selfish wish is that going forward, instead of thinking "i wish this artist would go back to what they were doing before", we can instead think "i feel so blessed that they left this piece of themselves behind for us".

Vane: I’m also quite fond of the flute arrangement I did throughout the song!! jamie was the one who suggested writing some flute and she’s kind of a brain genius for it. you will never rid the wind ensemble my our veins

[flute 1.mp3]

Jamie: and i'm very proud of the string arrangement i wrote!

i was hesitant to try writing this, because it felt like it was completely out of my skillset, but i honestly shocked myself with how it came out!! maybe… the secret to getting good at things… is to simply do them…………… wao

this song also includes my favorite synth ever… the ROLAND TB-303

because this song is my baby and i love acid house. this song is like diet acid house. one last music recommendation - everyone go listen to ceephax acid crew if you like forty year old british guys in jumpers with a whole bunch of scary looking electronics making shit that bangs. it also probably explains a lot about my taste in synth sounds

rice: for this song we had probably the most singer candidates in mind… it took us a long time to settle on one, but i'm really happy with our choice!

first of all Chis-A is free you can download her right now let me open with that. you can start downloading her right now and by the time you finish reading this she will be in your computer (OR ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE IF YOU HAVE IOS) and ready to sing for you https://voisona.com/song/download/ i'm not even joking  

Chis-A (pronounced chees-AYE, like the letter "A", by the way) came out in February 2022 for the free singing software Voisona. she's had a few hits on the JP side, such as "Idiotic Transaction" by isonosuke, and in general she felt the most emblematic of being kind of the "it girl" of the "new generation" of vocaloid to us, which is what we really wanted for this song!!!

this song was a love letter to a lot of things, but it was especially about the concept of beginnings, of making something brand new!!! and i always felt like this "beginner" characterization was a cute direction for her character- her as a determined and bright-eyed rookie in "Just Like Her" by Kareki Kashiwagi has always really stuck with me!!

and it's especially fitting because chis-a is FREE!!!! SHE'S FREE SHE'S A FREE VOICEBANK AND SHE CAN SING IN ENGLISH (FREE)!! SHE COMES WITH VOISONA BY DEFAULT AND VOISONA IS FREE SO IF YOU GET VOISONA YOU GET CHIS-A. SHE CAN BE ON YOUR COMPUTER FOR FREE. THE ONLY THING SEPARATING YOU FROM HAVING CHIS-A ON YOUR COMPUTER IS HITTING THE DOWNLOAD BUTTON. AND ALSO SHE'S REALLY GOOD!!!!!!!! https://voisona.com/song/download/

the fact that she's free and so easily accessible is why we felt she was the best fit- because she's so suitable to be a beginner's voicebank! i'm sure she is, and will be, the very first voicebank of many creators just starting out!!! and i personally selfishly would really love it if she could become the face of creativity and kindness and expression for people who are just starting out… like a guardian angel to people who are nervous…. we were all beginners once!!! but you're not alone and you'll never be alone…!!!! that's the kind of message i really wanted to express with "Clover"

everyone go make a chis-a song NOWWWWWWWWWWW https://voisona.com/song/download/

(NOT SPONSORED)

ah, and yes, about those mirror themes…. let's reveal the answer!!

“Static”, which is about a fear of change from the past, is mirrored by “Clover”, which is about bringing change into the future.

but change is needed to grow and be happy, and don’t you deserve to be happy, too?

song art by abi | Return?