Title: Funeral
Album: GRACE (track 002)
Composer: 沙我 (Saga)
Lyrics: 将 (SHOU)
This song premiered during a YouTube livestream to commemorate their 19th (session) bandiversary on May 19th 2022, and SHOU released the lyrics early in one of his subsequent Official note entries. This song was the first official single from the GRACE album.
歌詞 》
Funeral
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 》
Funeral
English Translation 》
Funeral
The days of youth
That vanished from a shooting star, sight unseen
Slipped through my hands
While I was smiling
Holding on to wounds that won’t heal,
Of flying, I dream
Let’s meet again by chance
At the end of the cycle of death and rebirth
The wind passed and I heard a voice
In a rumble of thunder, advances a funeral procession—
A darkness
That lights up the colours of a world cut open
The sky burns in a rightful scarlet colour;
I leaf through the pages of a tale
Weary of battle
It is the dream of a jellyfish I see
Until I take hold of
The deepening continuation of the story
Blooming in black, and getting torn to pieces
Our fingertips thread through the wind and snow
For a dream of bright sunlight
that we loved to the point that it would break us;
The wind passed and I heard a voice
In a rumble of thunder, advances a funeral procession—
A darkness
That lights up the colours of a world cut open
Prayers won’t reach you
It is my resolve alone that burns
Blooming in black, and getting torn to pieces
Our fingertips thread through the wind and snow
For a dream of bright sunlight
that we loved to the point that it would break us;
The wind passed and I heard a voice
In a rumble of thunder, advances a funeral procession—
A light
Which illuminates the colours of a world cut open,
and ends the journey we walked together
I wonder whether we will return
To Mother Sea
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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
Subsequent to the music video’s premiere on ALICE NINE.’s 19th (session) bandiversary on May 19th 2022, SHOU put the lyrics to Funeral up early under the subscriber line in one of his Official note entries, remarking just above it that,
19 years since the the five of us met and stood on the stage of Takadababa AREA.
SHOU, ALICE NINE. Official note 138
A song we unveiled on that sort of day.
Later, they also released an Offshot compilation video for the Funeral MV to their Official note subscribers.
Saga discussed the MV and its premiere in his interview in Official note 141, then in Official note 148 discussed what it was like to play Funeral at lives, all of which is under the subscription cutoff point. If you are a subscriber, click the aforementioned link, and search Funeral using CTRL+F (or Command+F) to start your reading at the first result. He then started off the interview in Official note 155 with some discussion of Funeral, all of which is above the subscriber line.
Saga: “Funeral” is like all the doubts and frustrations I could think of towards the scene crammed together.
Interviewer: In terms of its fixed position in the album…?
Saga: If you were to perceive it as a sort of entrance, that would be great.
Interviewer: What sort of aspect was the aspect that became the crux of its sound?
Saga: There were various ones, but first off, for recording the vocals, I told SHOU-kun something like, “can’t you sing like when you were in GIVUSS?” (the audience grins). But SHOU-kun, hearing that was like, “huh?”. He always eventually turns gentle, that guy. When he sings normally. He ended up becoming an adult after all, I guess. His voice gets gentle and twinkly. It’s okay to make that, you know, smaller, and it’s okay to be more full of quirks, and more heaving’s okay. Wasn’t I pushin’ him around? (laughs)
Interviewer: Because in the past when it came to Visual-kei folks, everyone was singing the inflections of words as a sob, weren’t they?
Saga: Uh-huh. So for that reason, I was saying a lot of stuff like, being full of vocal quirks is okay, heaving with a sob is okay, while we recorded. I say that and his singing voice changes, you see. But there was the HIROTO song that I did the public YouTube recording of, right? At the time of that one’s recording, I was unwell and couldn’t go to the vocal recording. So afterwards when I listened to it, it’s just that song where the singing style is different (laughs). But I thought we’d be fine with it like that so I chose to okay it. Clearly, it’s only this song where SHOU-kun’s way of singing is different. He’s doing a pure-hearted singing style, you see.
Interviewer: How about in terms of sound?
Saga: Like the singing, for the sound we also stopped doing everything we’d been doing up until lately, and we just packed our own thoughts into it. We got a lot of impressions like “I think it’s 90’s-ish” and “It’s 90’s-ish but it feels like something modern” and I thought those were interesting, but from my perspective, it feels like I did what I was able to do. There is the sense that our message was put into it properly. It might be hard to get across but I have the visceral sense that our message of what we want to say and do was properly crammed into the song. And, like, SHOU-kun included those sorts of thoughts when he was writing the lyrics. The things that I wanted to say regarding the Visual Kei scene that I’ve been saying since the last note, if I’m not mistaken….I kind of don’t really know what the right answer is. But the aim of the lyrics feels different than what it’s been up ’til now.
ALICE NINE. Official note 155
In CD DATA 2022 [KA-MI], they sat for an interview while they were still in the middle of creating the album and had a number of interesting things to say about Funeral. Below is one such excerpt regarding the lyrics:
Interviewer: Was there a particular theme concerning the lyrics [of Funeral]?
Saga: The theme of the lyrics is clear. It’s an impression of something that was coherent.
CD DATA 2022 [KA-MI], p.111-112
SHOU: When I read Saga-kun’s interview when we were beginning to create this song, he said “rather than ‘that sort of lyrics’, I’d like to get him to write something personal” so while in a dark room, playing the demo a hundred-some times, I used a writing style of sort of noting down the words that emerged. So I think I’m able to write lyrics that were nestled into the song. There was a sense of loss for the reality of the band’s current state and the coronavirus disaster, the future, light, and so on. I think on the whole the theme of the lyrics is not a rejection of pain, but rather of sticking close together and struggling to move forward. If we’ve been a novel of entertainment up until now, at this point you might say we’re pure literature.
The same day that the album dropped, an incredibly in-depth interview regarding the release of GRACE was put up by DECOLUM and featured a remark about Funeral.
SHOU: Because it’s an album whose racing mode starts from the emotional uplift of Funeral’s intro. For this composition, the rage of Nao-san’s drumming is amazing. I listen to the song and think, Saga-kun was severe towards Nao-san. However, in rehearsal, Nao-san was drumming that normally, so…
Saga: Well then, why not take it further?
Nao: Nooooooo thanks.
SHOU: With the rage of that drumming and such, I ended up thinking that all the members were amazing. I think that the feeling of sprinting from Nao-san’s solid drumming was connected to the car [on the album cover].
DECOLUM, Interview about GRACE, 2022.11.02
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, during which he gave attendees a listen to the underpinnings of Funeral and explained some of his thoughts about it. I did not jot down any specific facts about this song during the event, so if anyone has some facts noted down that they’d be willing to share, please leave a comment below.
Later, in ALICE NINE. Official note 169, Saga went into detail again about the song Funeral, all of which is available for anyone to read.
Saga: I made this with thoughts resembling the ones I had for “Living Dead”. Phrases that resound now and with the classics. However, there are lots of artists who adopt into their songs sounds from the 80s and 90s with the sense that “this’ll be stylish, won’t it?” For synth pop and city pop in particular, that’s the case.
Interviewer: Currently 80s – 90s music taste is getting a revival.
Saga: Yeah. In that sense, what revived the Visual Kei that I was listening to in the 90s was “Funeral”. So it is a song that feels sorta old, but it has the sense of, “because we’re making it now, that turned into this”.
Interviewer: Certainly, in terms of its elements, there are parts here and there that are reminiscent of good old-fashioned Visual Kei, but the end result is a cutting-edge sound.
Saga: That’s right.
Interviewer: For that, are you personally analyzing what sort of magic you drew from?
Saga: It was that, at that time, I felt that “Visual Kei is so damn cool”. I think it might be because that music taste of mine was cool (smiles). […] This song was made wondering, “isn’t it alright for us to do a revival even now?”. Instead of endlessly dropping our tuning wishing for a sound like Slipknot or Linkin Park has, we did the opposite, making a revival of the Visual Kei that we truly felt, believed was cool back in the day, but this song, it’s filled with a message of hoping that it’s cool right now.
Interviewer: I see. Nao-san’s drumming in this song was cool, wasn’t it?
Saga: Even in terms of the sound of the drums during recording, right now everyone goes with metal-ish sounds that sound like they strain the raw sounds, but this time we did the opposite. When at the point of wondering how much we should make the sound raw, we were seeking sound that was raw but that would fully let you hear the intensity it holds. The balance of that was difficult. When you’re wanting rawness, no matter what, you’re gonna end up not having enough of it. For that, the part that challenged us was, “while prioritizing rawness, how much intensity can we bring out?” So even if you listen just to the drums, I think you can understand it’s entirely different from the other parts.
Interviewer: I guess because the drums approached a natural sound, I had the impression that I was able to hear the sound of the bass in an extremely forward way.
Saga: You’re right. For that, the reason wasn’t that I had turned the volume of the bass up to make it stand out or anything.
Interviewer: Even so, it’s not just this song; why is it that throughout the whole album it stands out and you can hear it?
Saga: That was my challenge — for it to be really audible because I’d taken awfully great pains to create space with the arrangements. If I explain it a little more, on top of each part properly having a role, because we’re arranging it in order to create a situation of each instrument pushing and pulling against each other, without filling up space or having any unison, more than usual each instrument’s sound stood out and you could hear it. What’s more, this time, we made the number of sounds overwhelmingly small compared to usual. We’re also put in almost no synth. So you’re able to hear each part in contrast more.
Interviewer: That was the sort of trick you had.
Saga: Yes. Often, you see, you listen to a completed album and I think that when the sound of the bass doesn’t break through, everyone worries that it might be because the way they create sound is bad. However, I think it’s because in the end, it depends on the band’s arrangement.
Interviewer: If you choose an arrangement that doesn’t fill up space, you’ll inevitably be able to hear it.
Saga: Also, pointless sounds, sounds you don’t need, you don’t put in.
Interviewer: Like, you don’t add in pointless synth and make it glittery “because there’s insufficient sound.”
Saga: Indeed (laughs). However we did do it in the past.If you go back and give “IDEAL” and “PLANET NINE” a listen, I think everyone will understand the meaning of what I’m saying right away.
Interviewer: “PLANET NINE” in particular was like that.
Saga: We did that to a point where it was like, we weren’t even a guitar band anymore. Because even though none of the members are in charge of synths, it was like on both sides the guitar was watered down with synth playing, and we’d ended up having a synth-band feel (laughs). In that sense, it feels like we’ve gone back to being a rock band. For some reason, when you lose focus, you immediately put synths in.
Interviewer: Is that so?
Saga: Yes. I think it’s like that for a lot of bands. In our case, I’ll eliminate all of that. I’m saying, “we don’t need that anymore” “replace this with guitar”.
Interviewer: Particularly in ALICE NINE.’s case, as there are two guitarists.
Saga: That’s exactly it.
ALICE NINE. Official note 169