Title: Living Dead
Album: GRACE (track 001)
Composer: 沙我 (Saga)
Lyrics: 将 (SHOU)
歌詞 》
Living Dead
歌詞は「こちら」です。
You can view a copy of the lyrics in their original Japanese online [ here ].
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Romaji 》
Living Dead
English Translation 》
Living Dead
Ash, shadow; evening flickers
Look, once more the dreams and voices of the dead
(Just like the Living Dead)
A pure black
(There is inside me)
Opened the door
Crime, mitsu, says the clown ¹
Listen, even the sun is already far away
(Just like the Living Dead)
A pure black
(There is inside me)
Bloomed fragrantly in profusion
I’m not scared to vanishing(Burning down)
Reality is destroyed
No time for farewells(Til the end)
Living Dead
Wavering and decaying, to the point that I lose my way
(There is no salvation rotting away)
Stabbed was my prayer
(Just like the sad Living Dead)
“In order to be cognizant of life
I catch hold of the silhouette of death
From the time of the ice age until now
Universal things
Despair and hope
Anger and happiness
Hatred and love
In order to place upon the balance of the scales
A bit of stardust
I leave here in death the proof that I lived”
I take care of the long sigh that I love
A dream of nirvana
I’m not scared to vanishing(Burning down)
Reality is destroyed
No time for farewells(Til the end)
Living Dead
Wavering and decaying, to the point that I lose my way
(There is no salvation rotting away)
Stabbed was my prayer
(Just like the sad Living Dead)
Let’s untie the tassels and go to see heaven, the sky that burns
As for the signal—adieu
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NOTES / INTERPRETATION:
Blue font indicates text originally written in English in the official booklet.
oo1. The word mitsu literally means honey, but within the Visual Kei scene is a term used to refer to a fan that supports the band or one or more members of the band financially or materially. This is not the same as giving a band member a gift or buying goods. It can range from giving them money directly to things like buying equipment that they need and giving it to them.
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The above was translated by me; for the original post and more notes, check out [ PuncProsody ].
If you’d like to share the translation, please link to this page. Do not repost it. Thank you.
Other Fan Translations:
If you would like me to host your translation, link to your translation, or know of another translation that has been made (in any language), please let me know and I’ll put up a link to it. The more the merrier.
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Behind the Scenes
Shortly after the album GRACE was released, Saga held a nearly 3-hour live event on Youtube to talk at length about each song on the album, and while the archive of this incredible talk was only up for a brief period of time after the event ended, I jotted down a few notes during the course of it, and here are two remarks about Living Dead:
★ The march was created by tapping and drumming on several different boxes and then mixing the recorded sounds together.
★ The opening rhythm was made to be reminiscent of the opening of the GEMINI suite of songs. That way, the trilogy of albums goes VANDALIZE, GEMINI, and GRACE, with the final track Grace linking back musically to the first track on VANDALIZE, the beautiful name, thus turning the series of albums into a loop.
★ The speech in the middle of the track was originally going to be a clip of Hitler speaking, to underscore the fact of the song being sung from the perspective of soldiers going to battle and going against their own morals. Saga thankfully decided putting that sort of audio in wasn’t right for the song and SHOU wrote a monologue instead, presumably from the perspective of a soldier.
Later, in ALICE NINE. Official note 162, Saga went into detail again about how the song was made and what influenced it; all of which is under the subscription cutoff point. If you are a subscriber, click the aforementioned link, and search Living Dead using CTRL+F (or Command+F) to start your reading at the first result.
Shortly after, SHOU spoke about how the lyrics for the song were written in ALICE NINE. Official note 173, all of which is above the subscription cutoff point, a full translation for which is below:
Throughout the entirety of the album “GRACE”, I faced myself and wrote incredibly honestly. I wrote so honestly that even Saga-kun was astonished that “you’re going so far as to write that.” On top of taking the main composer’s intentions into consideration, my own state of mind at the time was also very much reflected in the writing. In the first track Living Dead, there happens to be a sort of narrative part from around “In order to be cognizant of life, I catch hold of the silhouette of death” to “I leave here in death the proof that I lived”. Precisely because of the fact that we put up notice of “LAST DANCE,” and were being cognizant of death, in order to write down there and then the proof that I myself had been living, what I am speaking in these lines is a powerful awareness of death, of the end. All throughout the lyrics of the album, that became something I was cognizant of.
SHOU, ALICE NINE. Official note vol 173