Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai - On the 24th of July 2002...

Time to reminisce, lol...

We'd heard "Free & Easy" already of course, and the single had been disappointingly short - her first without at least 8 remixes included.

The first time we heard "independent" was in an ad for baseball on TV in early April. Before there were even rumors of the single release, we started getting rumors & info about things like the uraayu photobook. In early May, a rumor about a full 10-track "independent" single being released in early June showed up. The rumored tracklist included remixes from your usual ayu mainstays from 2001 - nicely nice, D-Z, Brent Mini, Dub, the late Huge.

Well that early June date came & went, and another rumor about an "independent" single on July 17th started circulating. That July 17th release date seemed to be confirmed a few days later, but as we all know, that's not what happened. On June 18th, we learned the single was delayed to July 24th.

On June 16th a new Kose Visee CM started airing, featuring a song we didn't know the name of - what would eventually be known as "July 1st." (The 30 second version of the song played different lyrics for the second half of the chorus than ended up in the finished song.)

On June 30th, we got the single's new title - "H" - and the true tracklist... kinda? Track 2 was titled "already" instead of "July 1st" (though it was correctly listed as the Kose Visee CM song at the time), and "HANABI" was called the theme song for the TV drama My Little Chef ("Voyage" was the song to actually get that honor).

A full preview of "independent" leaked on July 1st.

For HANABI, we got a live MP3 - it was either during an OPEN AIR LIVE performance, or more likely soundcheck since there was no crowd. This leaked on July 3rd. The mp3 file that circulated had a skip in it about 41 seconds in. :P~ I used to play a ton of games at Yahoo! Games at the time, and I would do exceedingly well at Super Collapse if I was listening to this preview of HANABI at the same time, haha. :)

The covers were released on July 4th. It was announced that the colored versions would be limited edition. (Meanwhile, we finally got a full live recording of "July 1st" on July 5th. This file DID have the crowd in it, and so much skipping I couldn't even listen to it.)

Yesasia announced that the pre-orders of H through them would include two photo prints. They were nothing special, candid event photos if I remember correctly.

We watched the sales of H very very closely since her sales had started to drop - the fact that Daybreak never reached the 300,000 in sales that it was limited to was scaring a bunch of us. There was some debate over whether the copies shipped or copies sold numbers were "technically" more accurate, and there were arguments over whether H actually sold a million copies or not, but...

On October 12th, the million-seller commemorative limited edition version of H was announced for a November 7th release. :) A friend of mine who had a pink version of the original single ordered the limited edition reissue so he'd have one that was less "girly," only to be very disappointed when the reissue's disc had a big old heart on it. XD!!