ayu 'injects' feeling into her songs

[Delirium-Zer0]

Originally Posted by noidea

^ no, but Sunrise feels forced, like fake happiness (Oh LOOOK im HAAAPPPPYYYYY! *turns away* *cries* why shuya, oh whyyyyyyyy?)

Yeah, NEXT LEVEL didn't feel forced at all, it felt genuine. As did "Greatful days," for example. And those are two of the few "happy" ayu songs that I really enjoy.

And ayu's certainly done a fantastic job in the past with mixing happy songs with a certain nostalgic/melancholic feeling (in fact, I'd argue that that's what she's best at). In those cases (like "fairyland") she makes no illusions about the fact that the song has a sad aspect to it. But with "Sunrise" it sounded like there was sadness behind the happy-mask, but she was trying very hard to pretend like there wasn't any. "glitter" didn't really feel like it had any emotion at all.

And "untitled ~for her~" for me has the same issue as "fated" where... it is a genuinely sad song, but when delivering the vocals, Ayu seemed to have it in her head "okay, this is a sad song, I need to sound sad when singing it. Think sad, ayu, think sad!" and then when she sang it, the sadness was too much and too put on. Both of those songs are really very moving and very sad, but she overdoes it with the vocals and it lessens the songs' power.

When ayu just DOES, doesn't think, just DOES, she ends up so much more honest and relatable.