Speaking of Hikaru Utada, even if she is not familiar with Japanese music, many people can sing her "First Love" a few sentences.
The thick vocal lines and melodies are from the 17-year-old Hikaru Utada, which makes people remember her unique presence at once.
It became the theme song of the popular Japanese drama "The Condition of the Witch", and was sung countless times, which established the status of this song as a divine comedy.
When introducing ordinary singers, people tend to pile up adjectives, and when introducing Hikaru Utada, there may be no better explanation than the numbers.
Twenty years ago, in 1999, Hikaru Utada released his solo songwriting and composing full-length album "First Love", and the newcomer's first album sold more than 2 million copies on the same day, which was unique at that time.
Oricon has sold more than 7.65 million copies in Japan, the first album in the history of domestic album sales, and the only album that has sold more than 4 million copies in four weeks of release.
From the global market, sales totaled about 10 million copies, and they stayed on the Oricon list for 85 weeks!
To this day, First Love has been the best-selling album in Asia, when Hikari Utada was only 16 years old. The 1st, 4th and 8th of the top 10 album sales in Japan are her albums.
The title song of the same name, "First Love", is the theme song of the Japanese drama "The Condition of the Witch", and it is often ridiculed:
"Hikaru Utada sold 5 million as soon as he sang it."
With a soothing and progressive rhythm, Utada's light and hoarse voice renders the faint sadness to the extreme, which is the pain caused by first love.
Even though time passes, the imprint is still there, and it is three points into the wood.
Maybe it's just her work that knocks on the door of music, but it has amazed the world and become a landmark work in the minds of music fans.
20 years after his debut, Hikaru Utada sang loudly with vivid lyrics and a powerful rhythm. Firmly maintaining her "personality", she entered the center of the public eye.
However, she was not all smooth sailing.
She divides the Japanese lyrics she has written so far into 3 stages.
For Utada, making music is about "finding out what's hidden."
Stage 1 is a period in which the unconscious moves forward. Stage 2 is a period when awareness becomes possible to explore deeper. The third stage is to further reveal yourself after retiring, and become more sophisticated about writing Japanese lyrics.
Hikaru Utada was born in 1983 in Manhattan, New York, United States, to a musical family name, and the surname UTADA is pronounced very similar to the Japanese word for "singer", originating from a famous family in Takada County, Hiroshima Prefecture.
Her father was Japanese music producer Terumi Utada and her mother was singer Keiko Fuji.
Hikari Utada received a lot of attention from birth.
In 1990, 7-year-old Hikaru Utada formed the band U3 with his parents. In 1993, U3 released the Japanese album STAR, which reached the top 33 on the public trust chart.
On the album, 10-year-old Hikaru Utada sang "THANK YOU" and "Son Offering" in addition to his lyrics (when you hear the children's songs).
At the age of 14, he released the single "I'll Be Stronger" in his personal capacity as Cubic U, with a vinyl disc limited to 1,000 pieces.
At the age of 15, he signed to Toshiba EMI and released the single "Close To You", and in the same month released his first album "Precious" by the identity Cubic U.
The lyrics are all in English, with the exception of "Close To You", all the tracks are composed by her own lyrics.
At the age of 15, under the stage name of "Utada ヒカル", he released his debut Japanese single "Automatic/time will tell" after signing a contract with Toshiba EMI Club.
Single sales also rose from just over 40,000 in the first week of release, and exceeded 1 million copies eight weeks later, with a combined sales of more than 2 million.
Hikaru Utada had a great influence on japan's R&B boom around 2000.
The debut album "First Love" set a record for the first sales in Japan and even in Asia with 7.65 million copies.
The second album, Distance, set a record for the highest first-week sales on any chart in the world.
In 2004, after the release of Utada's debut album Exodus in Japan, it became the highest foreign music non-select album in history with a number of 520,000 copies in the first week.
Most of them were independently composed by Hikaru Utada, and Hikaru Utada's musical talent was not questioned.
Hikari Utada, along with Ayumi Hamasaki and Mai Kuraki, is known as the "Three Great Singers of Heisei".
Hikari Utada has a wide range of hobbies, and she seems to always maintain a childlike heart.
She is particularly fond of bears, and there is a large chinese doll bear, named after the Chinese surname "Zhang", calling it "Kuma Chang".
Before going to bed, I would chat with it, and often upload group photos to my personal blog, and even take it on a plane together, and I also created a children's song "I Am a Bear" based on it.
A bearsuit with a 1 million yen set and a 2 million yen LV bear resettlement box.
In 2014, when asked by fans on Twitter whether they had converted to Catholicism because of marriage, they replied that they believed in "Bear And Bear Religion", and also created their own creed of "Little Bear Religion" on Twitter.
She was curious about all kinds of fun food, was very good at Tetris, and became addicted to it from the age of 5, so she was invited by Nintendo to be the spokesperson for NDS consoles.
He played 26 wins and 4 defeats against 30 players at the arranged venue, and then played against two Nintendo development engineers, one win and one defeat.
In 2010, Hikaru Utada posted an "Important Notice" on her official website, stating that she would suspend her music career from 2011 onwards. On retirement, she explains:
Since the age of 15, she has been "protected" so that she can compose music, missing many opportunities to grow alone.
She wants to suspend her usual singer activities and concentrate on the activities that she should carry out as a "person", learning to be an ordinary person.
In fact, not only celebrities, but also busy with work or school, we sometimes forget what we really want in the first place because of the fast pace of life day after day, and we will have no time to care about the people around us.
She once said:
I could indeed lean on my throne and take the easy path, but I think that way my creativity and character would decline. I don't want to just be a crazy artist living in the paradise, I want to be connected to the real world and maintain humble conduct.
During her retirement, in 2013, her mother singer Keiko Fuji fell from a building and committed suicide, and there are rumors that Fuji Keiko has been suffering from mental illness for a long time.
The death of her mother was a big blow to Hikaru Utada, and even if she later got married and had children, she said that for a while she would think of her mother when she looked at her son's smiling face, and her heart was sad.
The new album after this comeback is dedicated to her deceased mother, who confesses:
If [the listener] can feel the breath of the mother, that is enough, because my presence is the continuation of the mother's life.
Hikari Utada, who has experienced this, has also become stronger and more confident.
In her album "Fantome" after her comeback in 16 years, she sublimated her longing for her mother into songs.
The lyrics of "Give You a Bouquet of Flowers" that "you don't usually wear makeup paint a light makeup" recalls the makeup she wore when her mother died in painful language.
She named the new song "First Love" released by Wei Wei in 2 years.
It's been about 20 years since I created my first piece. The theme I wanted to express in my heart was always the same, but as a performer there was a change, and the title of the song looked very refreshing.
Hikaru Utada had been married twice, in 2002, at the age of 19, she married the 15-year-old director Kazuaki Kiriya, and after divorcing four and a half years later, she broke up with an older painter.
In 2014, at the age of 31, she announced on her blog that she would marry Francesco Cagliano, an Italian 8 years her junior.
Suspended for 6 years, Utada Hikaru gave birth to a baby boy in addition to the second degree, and had a stable family life with her bartender husband, who was 8 years younger, while rushing to work on a new album.
In these years, the highest-selling and best-selling albums of her debut albums have dominated so far, and no one can break them.
Complex life experiences and diverse hobbies make her creation very special.
Born and raised in New York, she was also influenced by her parents' Japanese culture, which made it difficult for her to fully understand in two very different cultural environments.
Coupled with the tangled relationship with her parents (especially her mother), perhaps she will feel like a porcupine eager to hug, but worried about the existence of being stinged.
On the one hand, her references to European and American music are simply handy.
Many times there will be some unbearable surges (such as The album Ofty Desire, which I couldn't listen to at all in middle school, and then I went to college, and when I was about the same age as when she was creating, I suddenly understood that inner restlessness).
On the other hand, she has preserved deeply the subtle, gentle, and delicate part of East Asian culture (such as most of her Japanese songs), which is conveyed through different expressions from most East Asian singer-songwriters.
In an interview with her touring the United States, she said she enjoyed being an "outsider."
"I guess it's a big part of my music. Maybe that's one of the reasons people like or resonate with my work, because at the most basic level of people, everyone feels the loneliness of 'alien people'. Maybe it's at school, at home, or in society that you sometimes feel lonely, or you're different from everyone else, or you don't belong here. ”
If it is only rooted in one culture, it is difficult to see another part of her music. But it is also her intractable qualities that attract fans so deeply.
In Hikaru Utada's songs, there is no boring old tune, but it is constantly growing and enriching, interpreting his own unique life and music, still shining.
Her fragile and delicate voice, which has a deep sadness, stimulates the listener's protective instincts and is a good voice that brings strength to the listener.
From the silence of Hikaru Utada to the return, it is undoubtedly a bitter process for fans.
In the past 20 years, from the youth of "First Love" to the diversification of "Deep River", and later the atmosphere of "桜流し", and then to the faint narration of "True Summer".
She has never stopped breaking through her musical path.
As she once touched the lyrics of "Midsummer Shower":
Sad songs will one day become nostalgic songs, and invisible scars adorn my soul. I have you in my heart all the time, and the road that a person walks is started by you.
Lonely Lonely Lonely........
There is no sign at the fork in the road of life, I hope that Utada Hikari can go further and further, bringing more surprises and feelings to music fans!