Singer-songwriter Ami Ozaki appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on June 18th. She talked about the background behind the creation of her famous songs, her childhood like Kuroyanagi's, and her memories of playing the piano.
From her third year after her debut, she began providing songs to other singers. The first was Saori Minami's "Haru no Yokan" (A Premonition of Spring). "I was asked to give direction during the recording, and even though I'm much younger than Minami, I made quite a few requests, like, 'Excuse me, but please sing this part like this,'" she said. Since Minami is fluent in English, she expressed the English lyrics in a native way. When she asked for an expression that Japanese people could understand, Minami readily agreed, and she said, "I thought she was a nice person."
The song "Listening to Olivia," which he provided to Anri, was written when "Anri was probably 17 and I think I was around 21." He says that the lyrics and music for this song were written at the same time. In the case of Matsuda Seiko's "Angel's Wink," he received a call at the end of the year while he was dusting, and she asked him to write a song for her. He said, "I love Seiko-chan," so he asked, "Okay, by when?" and she replied, "By tomorrow." He revealed that as he was dusting, "a ray of light came through the window, and the dust started to sparkle. I came up with the idea of a song about an angel in the sky encouraging a girl who is troubled by love, and I wrote it in one day."
She says that as a child she "had a bit of a Tetsuko Kuroyanagi-esque personality." She couldn't understand the situation in the classroom where all the students were listening to one adult (teacher). "When I heard that Brazil was on the other side of the world from Japan, I thought that might be more important to me, so I immediately left the classroom to think about it, or I would go to the sandbox and dig a little. That's the kind of child I was." She says she was lonely because she couldn't communicate with people, so she told a lot of lies. "When I told lies, everyone was happy. What I do (lyric writing) is lies, fiction. I've been doing the same thing (as a child) and getting praised for 50 years," she reflects.
He started playing the piano at the age of seven or eight. When he proudly showed his older sister's piano teacher things like, "If you press this key like this, it sounds like a plant sprouting," the teacher said, "I'd rather teach this child than your sister." When he showed his composition homework to the teacher, the teacher said, "Oh, that's boring. What do you think music is for? It's to make people excited, to comfort them when they're sad, and for all sorts of dramas to unfold," and that ignited his passion. One day, while he was composing, the teacher came up behind him and played accompaniment, saying, "Let me play along with you." He said, "That moment was so wonderful that I decided to continue composing."
