The A Ballads notes on the "Special" site only included two comments by Ayumi, so here they are. Pardon the odd wording, I will try to make it sound smoother later.
001.「RAINBOW」
Up till now, I had not yet written lyrics based on the hearing everyone’s voice personally, so I took the chance to do that with ‘Rainbow’. I was so happy to have received over 100,000 letters! At first, I was like, “How do I go about this?”… (bitter laugh). I had wanted to hear (or read) everyone’s voice (through lyric and theme); amongst them there were some really sad themes but contrarily there were also happy ones. If the colors I’d write became images, there would be 100,000 feelings for 100,000 people… So, to tie together bits and pieces of the words, I thought those who are writers would do it much more skillfully than ayu. It wasn’t that the subject would be 1/100,000, as I had looked through them all, so ayu had written about the feelings and image I got from reading them in their entirety.
002.appears "HΛL'S Progress"
Prior to singing this song, the lyrics were not quite finished as I had just gotten the idea. In ayu’s songs up to now, “me” and “you (anata)”and“you (kimi)”were used for the protagonists, and I had my own ideas of how boys felt [about love]. I’ve sung a lot about “what’s in the heart” but in 「appears」 was the first time that I had used “lovers.” Passing by a happy couple is an everyday occurrence. It has the feeling of seeing this from the third person POV. Also, it was the first time I used the word “like.” When I was filming the PV, I got really embarrassed! (laugh). (from beat freak #142 Nov 2000, a VERY old comment!)
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[Edited by AHS Staff]
Discussion/Thanks:
http://www.ahsforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47426