ROCK & READ 078 Ruki’s Interview (Part 3)
Q: How did the things go with the summer outdoors live?
R: The outdoors live was decided by fans’ vote. (Fans were able to vote which songs they want to hear during that live) Rather than choosing the songs by our own will, we let for fans to choose the songs they want us to play. But it ended up being our most popular and standard songs. We were like “what the hell is this?”. (lol)
Q: Normally, there would be a lot of different patterns (of songs) compared to usual, right?
R: But in a way, receiving an opinion that the songs we usually play are good, somehow makes you more confident in the things you do. Some songs that got to the top were from “DOGMA”. But now, there was this feeling that we shouldn’t be playing “DOGMA” again.
Q: If it’s something from the recent works, the probability of it being played during a regular live is high. So, of course, songs like this being chosen makes you feel confident. After all, in a case like this, fans usually tend to choose the songs that are rare, the ones you can’t hear during regular lives.
R: Yes, there weren’t any rare songs at all, in the ranking. I was like “oh?”. There were songs (in the list) that have never been played live before, so I thought fans would choose those for sure, but that wasn’t the case. Because, in the beginning, when we were planning this, we had a feeling that the voting results will have this “all-time best” feeling. After that, we thought, well, anything will do. (lol)
Q: But, the funny thing is that 2017 was the GazettE’s 15th anniversary and since there were such festivals held before, you’d expect for this one to be flashier, right? But it kinda went down at this perfect timing. (lol)
R: Ahahaha! That’s so true. (lol)
Q: So, there weren’t many thoughts of “anniversary” considering this event in the first place?
R: There wasn’t, from a while ago.
Q: To think about it, you don’t really do birthday celebrations either.
R: We don’t. None of us likes them that much.
Q: So, you’ve never done it?
R: Only Kai-kun does birthday celebrations every time we’re on tour, for some reason.
Q: That means you have birthday celebrations from time to time, right?
R: Sometimes. (lol) Since we often do tours in winter, Kai will, of course, celebrate his birthday there. As for me, I’ve never had a chance to celebrate my birthday on the tour. But I want to do it. Ahahaha! I’ve never been congratulated. I always bring my own cake. (lol)
Q: Well, isn’t that good too, then?
R: But I want to get it as a surprise! (lol)
Q: Then why don’t you plan your schedule in the way that your birthday would be during the tour?
R: But when you think about it, isn’t everyone kinda celebrating their birthdays recently? Also, what do you mean by saying a birthday celebration? Wouldn’t that be disgusting? Stuff like “RUKI’S BIRTHDAY LIVE!”, it would be the same thing as writing your own birthday card. (lol) Maybe it just makes me sad, thinking about us organizing and celebrating our birthdays ourselves.
Q: But it seems different to me. Anniversaries, birthday celebrations or birthday lives, doing all of that would be for your fans.
R: Eh? But we’d get gifts. How is it for fans?
Q: Well, that’s true but, I think they would love to spend a special day like this together, to celebrate together. It’s about establishing a place like this for your fans.
R: No no no no no no! If that’s the case, then there wouldn’t be any talk about setting up the gift boxes. (lol)
Q: Well, rather than putting a label of “birthday” you can do it just as a normal live on that day. (lol) Now, since you spent the most of 2017 in the underground to produce “NINTH”, it’s going to be our 3rd keyword. This time you simply called this album “NINTH” because it was your 9th album. Did you have any concept for the album?
R: Right, we didn’t have an actual concept. Well, rather than that, it was decided for it to be that way. Because “DOGMA” had such a strong concept. (lol) Now, there was this thing, that rather than looking at yourself and trying to fix what is wrong, we wanted to put the essence of ourselves in this 9th album. We wanted to put everything that we were until now into it. We wanted to say this is where we are right now. That was what we wanted to bring out of this album for the GazettE in 2018.
Q: It’s not just “right now”. You could say, it’s a “now” with everything that has happened before. On the contrary to the previous album, we could say that this is what this album’s concept was, that’s why it didn’t have that strict concept of the dark sound. (lol)
R: There was no such thing (no strict concept). (lol) But on the contrary, because we did “DOGMA”, we were able to make an album like this right now. All these works are great. Because we made “DOGMA” we can say that we have a weapon like this in our collection, and that’s why we were able to make something different from “DOGMA”.
Q: That is my personal impression, but this was the album that I was able to listen to witch such an ease.
R: That’s awesome to hear. It’s the GazettE thing, I guess, or how should I put it.
Q: Moreover, it’s easy to listen to even without having any previous knowledge about the band.
R: Yup. So, I guess, if you say that it’s easy to listen, it actually is.
Q: Was that also your intention?
R: While listening to the whole thing, I wanted it to have the same feeling as the endings of the GazettE lives. And we don’t really do lives that end with the feeling of disappearing into the darkness. (lol)
Q: Talking about album’s format, for a while you had a default of 14 songs per album, right? This time there are 12 songs, the total time is only around 43 minutes long, and most of the songs are about 3 minutes long. Looking at this information, you can see that the album is very accessible. Was that also one of your intentions?
R: It wasn’t intentional. (lol)
Q: So, why 12 songs this time then?
R: Well, it’s not like we intended to make exactly 14 songs on the previous albums either. Because it’s all about balance. There were many albums in the past that had 10 songs too, right? We put a lot of thought into this album, but the song number wasn’t something that was strictly decided.
Q: And the album having so many 3-minute songs, is also something, that you realized only after the album was done?
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
theartofmadeline
areudirty
blakekathryn
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
