On Lyrics in Foreign Languages

I suspect that I am the world's greatest fan of the song Kyo o Ikiyo by Sunny Day Service. I know very little about the song or the band. I have listened to the song hundreds of times. In 2019 it was my 8th most listened to song.

I have no idea if the band is popular. This song is on the 1995-2018 greatest hits album for Sunny Day Service,¹ and given they have a greatest hits album they must have some kind of fan base. The frontman of the band appears to run the record label that publishes their music, Rose Music,² and they are still doing tours in 2026.

His website lists that he will soon be performing as the opening act to "the airport music concert"³ as a one man act at Saporo Musica Hall Cafe with tickets going for 5000yen (drink included). I wish I was going! "It will be a live that you can enjoy relaxingly at the cafe."³ According to the Google Form the tickets are sold out.

I have been listening to the song since 7th of Feb 2019 according to Spotify. It was the 24th song by Sunny Day Service I saved that week, but it's by far the one that stuck with me the most. I associate the song with the nascent relationship I had at the time. It was just before my final year of school, I had reunited with my high school girlfriend of 5 months, which was interrupted by a monthlong family trip that January. After returning to Perth, there was an wave of new music in my life which this song was a part of.

Perth summers are hot, I vividly remember swimming in the pool opposite my then girlfriend's house. The neighbours were away and she was feeding the dogs or watering the plants, or maybe she just had a spare key and we were trespassing. It was a lovely house, we snuck in the back and played our new music on an old bluetooth speaker and swam.

I don't recall if she introduced me to the band -- she introduced me to a lot of music, but this could have been a Spotify recommendation. She definitely introduced me to the song My Jinji which was saved on the same day as Setsuna, the first Sunny Day Service song in my library. This was during my listen to the entire discography era,⁴ so was followed by 30 more Sunny Day Service songs that week.

I don't know what the song Kyo o Ikiyo means. I'm not a big lyrics guy at the best of times. I often know all the words to a song and sing along for years without contemplating the meaning, much to my friends' chagrin. To me lyrics are just another instrument. As important as drums. No insult to drums, they are important -- there are many phenomenal songs with phenomenal drums. They can elevate something good to something great, but scarcely elevate something mediocre to something good. It's rare that a song is good on the basis of the drums alone. Lyrics are like that to me, in contrast to a striking melody or a roaring guitar solo, which can make a plain song into something magical. Music makes me feel things words can't.

Kyo o Ikiyo is in a language I don't speak. I sing along in a facsimile of Japanese, much like I acted as a toddler when I would pretend to speak into a toy phone. There's something different about having strong emotions wrapped up in a song whose language you don't know. The lyrics become sponges representing the time you internalised them. Not as visceral as smelling a scent from years past, but maybe the next best thing.

Songs change as you change. You grow into them. A breakup breathes new life into a lyric on heartache, a death makes a song about missing someone sting in a new way. It's scary losing your old interpretations of songs. Like reading a book before watching the film adaptation, only to lose the faces you used to picture when reading it. It's easy for new interpretations to entirely supplant old ones. I listened to Pressure To Party a hundred times before going through the emotions it portrays. Freakin' Out on the Interstate too. I can't remember how I used to scream those songs before, but it's certainly not the way I do it now.

I don't think I can have that experience with Kyo o Ikiyo. Maybe if I learnt Japanese or force fed it to myself till I grew numb to it,⁵ but the language barrier prevents me from retroactively finding new meaning in the lyrics. Perhaps I'll reread this in 2036 and disagree, having re-associated it with some other period of my life but at the time of writing, listening to Kyo o Ikiyo makes me feel 17, swimming in a pool on a hot day, young and foolish, free and unburdened, self obsessed and naive. I'm sure I was stressed about something at the time. Whatever it was escapes me now. I remember it very fondly.

The other songs from that era I suspect are vulnerable to losing that effect. I was listening to Bar Italia a whole lot back then too, a song about a drunken night gone on too long. When her and I listened in 2019 it was about the abstract idea of a drunken stumble home rather than the lived experience. Now when I sing the words they are tainted by my own drunken nights I can now half remember. I wish I wrote down my interpretation of the songs at the time, I wish I could bottle my thoughts to have another sip down the line.

So for now I just have Kyo o Ikiyo. It has simple riffs, two guitars complimenting each other back and forth, the singer sounds like he misses someone and resigns himself to that fate at the end. I still don't know what any of the words mean, but somewhere between my ears and my heart they get translated to warm sun, cold water, open doors, open days.