Rice: This was another song I started in my ill-fated Shi’an-P aspirations. Medium5 it’s not too late I’ll quit this bum ass music circle to become a fulltime Shi’an-P if you drop her AI voicebank
炜 is a Chinese character that roughly means to glow or burn, and is pronounced “wei”, so the title is meant to be romanized like “WEIWARD ROMANCE”. There’s a couple of meanings you can extrapolate from this:
The 3rd meaning ties into its flavor of “love”: it’s definitely a “reckless” love, but the specific theme we aimed for with this song was “a girl who loves the city, and the city who loves her back”. The romantic call-and-response with her lover is not just with one person, but with the entire nightlife. The alcohol is horrible, the air is thick with smog, and the crowd is deafening, but the dirty streets sparkle nonetheless, and you can’t bear to be apart.
The call-and-response lyrics are meant to work as individual statements, but would also form a mostly-coherent sentence if you fit them together. Our Japanese translator and good friend loved this, he loved that I did this after I promised 炜WARD ROMANCE would be easier to translate than BUTCHER VANITY
“Romance” here is also meant to have a bit of a theatrical/drama connotation. That’s why the PV has drama bars and scrolling credits.
I wanted to use Feng Yi for this song because I likeeee herrrrrr. I already had her voicebank, her VIMALION design is one of my favorites (I also think it was a pre-Yi Xi fan favorite), she has a cute voice and her Opera mode makes a really unique timbre…. And she’s Chinese.
Khee, the artist, didn’t point this out in any of the posts she made about her work, but I particularly love that WR Feng Yi has eye bags. Cuz she’s up partying late!! It’s so cute.
As for the MV, I've always loved this bouncy puppet animation style even before it became The Trendy Vocaloid Thing (even before it became known as an "animation meme" thing... you have no idea how far back my history goes....). I actually think the musical direction I gave for song production was "something bouncy so the visuals can be a bounce animation loop" which was probably not very helpful. Anyways, I figured if there was any FF video to be indulgent on trend-wise, it should be this one. I hate when I have to animate typography though so I hope that that goes out of style soon
Also, this was the first song where I contributed to the production! I did all the Chinese instruments and the main drumline. I feel pretty proud of this even though it’s kind of a small thing. A lot of the instruments are from a Peking opera pack, which I thought was cute and fitting for Feng Yi. I did listen to some Peking opera growing up, but I feel like they also used this percussion in like, cartoons and stuff a lot, which is probably more where I absorbed them from lol. Either way all the toinks and gongs are very nostalgic and dear to me
Jamie: If you've never listened to the band Yellow Magic Orchestra, I highly recommend it! Their music was vastly ahead of its time, and gives major context to a lot of synthpop and video game music. I'm bringing them up because, IMO, they also put a lot of the production choices on this song in context as well - I was trying to channel Rydeen juuuust a little bit.
That inspiration is probably more obvious in the original demo we had for this song though! Originally, before we basically rewrote it, I had also produced a little demo based on Rice's melody and some incredibly rough lyrics. I'm still really attached to it, but mostly because the Touhou trumpets are louder in this one
Rice: Oh can I add context to the original lyrics. This song was originally called "Shanghai Romance" but then I realized that was the name of an Orange Caramel song so I changed it in a tiffy. Its working title was "Chinese heaven" (joke) for a pretty long time. I am sure there are still some final files that have "heaven" in the title because we keep forgetting we changed it back to romance.
After Jamie made that demo from the refrain, I also made a shoddy little demo for the full song, though I'll only post a snippet of it here... Listening back to it, more of it carried into the final product than I remembered. But also, listening to this really makes you think.... Man..... Experienced producers sure are something else....
Vane: My contribution to the vision is I wanted this to sound like a song that would have a Touhou parody if it were released in 2008. Where is the Hong Meiling* version of this I demand it now. Also, I forgot to label my crowd vocals. Sorry jamie. I love you.
*Rice has given Chinese approval to cast the most (?) Chinese (?) touhou girl for this song even though they don’t know who this is
Jamie: seriously i need to stress that they made me mix thirty five fucking crowd chants for this
Rice: Wait can I clear up a misconception here. Jamie did not have to deal with 35 unlabelled crowd vocals because I rendered out like 15 of them and MINE were labelled. It was just Vane. Just let me get that out of the way that I was better than Vane
<-- RICE’s crowd vocals (beautiful stunning labelled clean <3)
<-- Vane’s crowd vocals (disgusting horrible appalling unlabelled stupid)
Vane: you hate me
Rice: I hate you
Jamie: hey guys whats up