Beer & Ramen

Last week, my band Second Player Score hit the recording studio to lay down tracks for our latest upcoming EP. Which EP would that be, you ask? Well, since the previous two EPs were Four-D: The Winter Suite and Four-D: The Autumn Suite, then it must be either Four-D: The Spring Suite or Four-D: The Summer Suite, right? Wrong.

It's Beer & Ramen (yes, that's the title).

That's right, we're interrupting our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a project that was born partly out of our recently-formed partnership with Visual Reel Entertainment in Japan and partly out of my desire to fulfill a years-long jonesing to sing and record songs in Japanese.

There will be seven tracks on the Beer & Ramen EP (three covers and four originals):

- Ue O Muite Arukou, or, as it's more commonly known in the states, Sukiyaki.

- Go Go Kikaida!! the main theme song to the '70s tokusatsu show that I talked about in this previous post. If you've read that post, then you know that when I was five years old, I spontaneously volunteered to sing this song to my kindergarten class for who knows what reason... foreshadowing, perhaps?

- Hitohira No Hanabira, the greatest song in the history of the universe.

- An as-yet-to-be-titled song that, right now, is called "The Collab Song." It's called that because it'll be a collaboration between us and the CEO of Visual Reel, our buddy Andrew Kaiama. It's a tribute to the anime series Tokyo Revengers (covered in this Anime Roundup post) and we're doing the choruses (in English, boring) while Andrew will be doing the verses (in Japanese, since he's way more fluent than I am). Once he finishes his lyrics, we'll be giving the song a new title. Or maybe not?

- Gloria (off our first album, Fortress Storm Attack), Eye of the Needle (off our third album, Glorified), and Ragged Town (ditto), all redone with the verses in Japanese. Yes, I'm singing them. I even did the translation, which I'm hoping is acceptable (Andrew proofed it, so I'm sure it is). Weird thing is, I did those translations a while ago just for fun, thinking that maybe it would be cool if one day they could be used as the theme songs to an anime adaptation of Glorified. Little did I know that years later, we'd actually be recording them! And while the anime adaptation is not a thing just yet, who knows what might be in store...

Anyway, we're hoping to release the EP in May or June, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Kikaida's first broadcast date in Japan on July 8th. Stay tuned for more details! (and yes, we'll be resuming our work on Four-D later this year)