Oh, "I am...," without question. It was the first Ayu album that I pre-ordered, and I was SO EXCITED when it arrived from YesAsia (along with the poster)... I opted for the poster from YesAsia rather than the gray pin from CDJapan.
It came out my senior year of high school, and I have SO many good memories from that time (and bad ones too XD)... I was obsessed with Cowboy Bebop and got the DVD & soundtrack box set for Christmas, I would listen to Ayu & go to Ayu sites during lunch at school, I was making a lot of graphics and really learning design principles more and more, and I was obsessed with playing Chrono Cross, lol.
I got a bunch of Ayu stuff from YesAsia that Christmas cuz I got a gift certificate for YA - I got SEASONS, the VCDs of Concert Tour 2000, a bunch of other stuff lol. Mostly overseas pressings of everything at the time, but I did get the Japan version of SEASONS and I was very proud of that, haha.
But the lead-up to "I am..." was just so crazy! The leaked version of the title track had a very different mix (the instrumentation was louder), we were starting to get the "Daybreak" Panasonic CMs, A Visual Mix was making everyone wish they had a Japanese PS2, Inuyasha's new movie had a new Ayu song in the trailer ("no more words"), and just in general there were ALL these songs from CMs like "Naturally" and "still alone" that we were all chomping at the bit to finally hear. XD Good times, good times.
