Zy 44: Merry

Merry has been concentrating on producing their new album since autumn of 2008. They took a long time to select songs and work on pre-production before they started recording. Then, in 2009, they'll release their new album before the spring. We will be able to get the album before the first live of their spring tour. However, during this interview, they were still doing recording. Being held before listening to their new songs, we were able to talk to them while they were still in the process of recording, which is quite rare.


Well I have to say that we were able to get in early to get an interview with you, but perhaps we are a little too early as you are still in recording. (smile) How is it going?

Nero: Today, November 22nd, we have finished half of our recording. So we can see the whole image. Honestly speaking, we took a long time before starting recording. And it was hard to unify the members about themes for the album. But once we started, it was easy. So there are songs where our various thoughts have been intertwined to make something.

At first, what kind of CD did you think of making?

Gara: All of us brought in our opinions about what Merry lacks and what we wanted to do. Then we started to think about those things. Our theme was "to cast our skins." We released the corpus of our "retrock" in our third album and the next one is our fourth album, so we wanted to try to be more playful, I think. We started to make an album that wasn’t very Merry, while still being Merry. We wanted to take off our veils, so to speak. And we'll do a tour in 2009, so we wanted this album to connect to that too. It's better to have songs for lives rather than pieces of work, so there are some quite violent songs on the album.

While you do things for your lives, are the sounds you make the sounds of you casting off your skins?

Gara: Yes. How can I put it? It's the music that we don't think about in our heads. We thought music that we could ride on using our bodies would be better. I talked with Yuu a lot about that because the songs we recorded in the first half of our recording were almost all written by Yuu.

For these songs, what did Gara ask Yuu to do?

Yuu: I think that I have made various songs up until now while trying out different things. You know, Merry plays various types of hard songs. We all chose these songs before recording, so it was hard work.

Gara: We thought about things like how we could imagine a scene in a song, like, "Ah, we want the fans to sing here" or "We, the five members, move like this and the lighting is like that."

Yuu: As we listened to the original songs, we chose songs where we could imagine things easily.

And you wanted to present a different kind of hardness than you previously did as well.

Nero: So in those parts, pre-production was the hardest. In 2008, we released various singles...among them, there were songs that everyone thought were good even though some of them were very unusual. And we did a nationwide tour last year. I wanted to make an album that we could put all of our experiences in to.

As you said, your recording is half done. Do you think you can "cast your skins," which is your theme? How about kenichi?

kenichi: Can I cast my skin? (laugh) Well, I can see the finish, but only vaguely. And we all talked about how lives are very important for a rock band like us, so when you listen to our CD, we want you to feel the heat of our performance.


For the rest of the interview, please refer to Zy 44.
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