Jump to content






04. ダブル レインボウ

Posted by H!P46, 01 November 2007 · 1159 views

あやっぺ
ダブル レインボウ 作詞久保田洋司 作曲編曲ナオキ

Song Credits

I've already talked about 久保田さん for 「今はレットイットビー」 so I don't need to go over his credentials again. 岡ナオキ on the other hand... he's part of the Onion Brothers Company as a composer and an arranger. Don't worry, you're not supposed to have heard of the Onion Brothers Company! 岡さん's work has been primarily in the secondary music industry (audio-visual sector), writing the music for 「記憶」 which was one of the EDs for 2007 anime 「スクールデイズ」 and also arranging a couple of tracks for the anime version of Namco Bandai's game 「THE IDOLM@STER」 (aka 「Sim つんく♂」). But it's mostly that sort of stuff rather than Oricon stuff.

Title

Here we go then... title track. I believe this is actually the first ever title track for a Hello! Project album (ignoring 「甘い誘惑」 because the full album name was 「1st GAM ~誘惑~」). I mentioned a few things that struck me about the title in the opening on this series so I won't mention them again.

Opening Thoughts

I heard this on FIVE STARS before I got the album... yes, postal strike really was that bad!

ダブル レインボウ
Double Rainbow

男友達よ いてらしているわ
Boyfriend, living painting pictures
れなかったは 大事自分部屋
The picture you couldn't sell is treasured on my wall

セルビアを一人きりして
Travelling alone through Serbia
 一筆えた
You added a stroke of blue

にはとてもわからないけれど あぁ
I really don't understand it
「これで完成さ」とつぶやいた
You muttered, "This is complete"
に ねてもまだ
ききれないが ある
Even though I've layered the colours in my heart
There's still an unfinished picture

友達は ギターき からへと
His friend is a guitarist; town to town
めばこうして 素敵をほら かせてくれるのよ
When he drinks he plays me a beautiful song like this

どんなにしそうにしてても
But however cheerfully he plays
爪弾はなぜか ない
For some reason the strumming sound is a melancholic echo

にはとてもわからないけれど あぁ
I really don't understand it
さ」って さりげなく
"An old song", nonchalently
は心に ふるえてるだけでまだ
らないが ある
Just from the shaking of my heart there's still an inaudible sound

自信もなくて もそばにいてくれない
When I don't have confidence and nobody will come to my side
そんなきまって をかけてくる
At those times, a voice always calls out to me

にはとてもわからないけれど あぁ
I really don't understand it
「それでいいんだ」とってくれる
You say to me, "That's the way"
に もうすく完成する
大切が ある
In my heart there'll soon be a complete picture

Lyrics and Translation

Listening to this song, is the main thing to strike you why the heck is it called 「ダブル レインボウ」? Or is it why the heck Serbia? Or is it whether she's in love with her boyfriend of his guitar-playing friend? Many questions... many answers in this lovely song.

First of all, back to the title. The song is not actually anything to do with double rainbows as such but it's not entirely disconnected. It's to do with colour.

So, boyfriend paints and sells his works. Simple enough but one was special so he couldn't sell it like his others. He gave it to his girlfriend who obliged by hanging it on the wall. It's her version of this so she'd sell her own legs before selling it. It's her material connection with her boyfriend so when he ups and leaves to backpack through Serbia, there's a figurative stroke of blue across the picture. Blue of course symbolises cold/cooling and sorrow. Well then... why Serbia? I guess that has something to do with its troubled past. For those who aren't up on their Eastern bloc history, they were part of Yugoslavia and were the aggressors of the Kosovo War. Non-Europeans probably wouldn't remember that as much although the non-Serbian side was NATO peacekeepers rather than national military. Anyway I don't want to get political though so on with the speculation. Serbia is pretty much the other side of the world to Japan. It's near Italy for those who don't know. It's not next to Italy (East across the Adriatic Sea from Rome and about 100 miles North-East inland) but I think most people can find Italy on a map from its shape even if their geography skills are Miki-esque! ^_^ Of those I'm leaning towards the latter. It's far away, not majorly touristy but not so remote as to make it bizarre.

I love the first line of the chorus because of how it's built up and then clarified. Her boyfriend is away in Serbia, as mentioned, and then she screams "I don't get it!". At first that seems to be her asking "Why did you leave me?" but then she goes and tells us that she was in fact talking about the painting. She doesn't understand how it's complete because something falls short in her heart. This is the second time in the album we come across 『心』 but this time I translated it as "heart"! What gives? It's emotional so it should be "mind", right? Technically but somehow I just felt like this time "heart" carries the message better. The picture is not something to be thought about. It's something to be felt as part of her. "Mind" would work as well, but my interpretation is "heart".

The second verse then kicks off talking about one of her boyfriend's friends; another artist but in a different discipline. The words "live free" come to mind... Anyway, he seems either like a really good friend, taking time to cheer up his friend's girlfriend or he has a secret agenda (while the cat's away...). ^_^ I prefer the former. I don't think it's quite the type of song like the latter. 『こうして』 means "like this" but doesn't, in the context of the song, actually mean this song. If you imagine you're talking to her and she says "a beautiful song like this" she'll get up and play a song on a CD or something. Something, not upbeat but not sad... something like 「Moon River」 from 「Breakfast at Tiffany's」 (back to Audrey Hepburn already!). But it doesn't matter what it is because it just turns into 「Gloomy Sunday」! ^_^ If you don't know what it goes like I suggest you don't satisfy your curiosity! <3

The second chorus continues the focus on the guitarist friend. This time she doesn't understand why the lack of positive effects from the music. I imagine the setting to be at the girl's place, the friend sitting on the floor with the guitar with that sort of bar musician air of confidence, addressing her like she's twenty people on a night out, hence his nonchalance. But still, he's playing but inside she feels empty.

The middle eight is the pivot point of the song. Despite all this ignorance she has something which helps her through the day. Her emotional connection with her boyfriend that makes her feel as though he's giving her a helping hand.

The last chorus tells us that the voice in her head encourages her and she manages to stop being mired in frustration. In the very last line there's a word 『大切な』 that I didn't translate, or rather couldn't. It means "important" but I couldn't think of a way to put it into the translation without sounding overburdening because the important thing is that the picture is complete, not that she values it (which is a corollary of it being complete). Finally, things are looking up... XD

Musical Style

I'm not going to get overly technical for this song because the instruments are your classic ballad set... piano, guitar, strings, bass guitar and drums. However, I'm a big huge fan of piano ballads. Songs like Aya's versions of 「なごり」 and 「ひこうき」 from the 「Folk Songs」 series of albums, 「You're My Only Shinin' Star」 (loved it from hearing it on 「みんなのテレビ」 before the 「!ドキ」 version)... you know, the stripped arrangement songs, just a piano, simple percussion and that voice. Outside of Aya, there's of course 「メロディーズ (Piano独唱Version)」, Miki's rendition of 「Amazing Grace」 from her dinner show and, further afield, 「」 (the ED for 「こう、約束場所」 which I mentioned in 「HAPPY TO GO!」), is simply beautiful. It's just the wonderfully meaty and earthy sound of a piano that makes it, in my opinion, an unrivalled musical instrument. Acoustic guitar can sound amazing as well and it has its merits but on the bigger picture, it's piano all the way. I actually learnt of the mechanics of the piano from an episode of 「Tom & Jerry」 called 「The Cat Concerto」 where Tom is a concerto pianist and Jerry sabotages his performance (It won an Oscar in 1946). I saw that years ago by the way, not recently! Syndication, naturally. :) Before that it was a "Eh? Press keys... sound comes out!" sort of affair because we had a keyboard at home but a piano at school to sing in assemblies (like most schools did) which I just assumed to a keyboard running on bigger batteries! :o

Anyway, the piano in the song is nice and earthy and helps invoke a sort of bricked apartment in my head. I don't know why... laminate flooring and low wattage lights as well to play on the warm autumn/winter feel. Shaggy (rough, not Scooby!) rug and bean bag chairs. Then again, the laminate flooring may be tatami mats (similar colours). Regardless, with the music I can picture the narrator talking to whoever she's talking to. It's not herself but I don't think it's anyone else. Eh? XD If it helps, just imagine she's making an audio diary.

The lead guitar plays a rather jazzy sounds throughout. A lot of sliding up and down the frets with a smooth soft tone like the jazz version of 「100回のKISS」 from 「音楽館」 which is incidentally another great piano song. It's probably somewhere in Mattthecat's Aya archive for those who don't know what song I'm talking about. The jazz version, not the original. The two are unbelieveably different musically! It's obviously not quite as prominent as in that song but it's very similar and it's a sort of gentle, comforting sound, a bit like Aya's 「Hmm~...」 at the end of the song.

Strings are a funny set of instruments. Arranging them takes a fair bit of know-how because alone they occasionally sound like they've eloped from the sound department working on 「Psycho」 or something (just at the end of the bridge). In the context of the song however, it feels as it sounds; stop-start. I don't mean that in a bad way. I hardly ever mean things in a bad way. It's just words have a tendency to pick up some idiomatic nuance rather than just being words. Stop-start means just that; it stops, it starts. In musical terms words, note-rest-note-rest. It's otherwise called staccato but we're having enough trouble with English without running into Italian. The effect in this song sounds like a hardship, as if they're truncated breaths at a weird tempo. Just me? Well there's more to the strings than that. It does the typical ballad function in the chorus which is to play a solemn little tune.

The drums are, I'd describe it as "lazy". As with the strings earlier, this isn't a negative comment. By "lazy" I mean it's leisurely and doesn't really exert itself. For most of the song it's just the hi-hat going. If you imagine the song being performed with a live band, all things being equal the drums would drown out a lot of everything else that's going on but even the big splash cymbal parts sound sort of reserved. Imagine Aya at the Sports Festivals during the vault doing her trademark dummy run to get the crowd excited. It's that sort of thing, expecting something that's not there. Bad example really because she eventually vaults the thing anyway. So yes... very lazy drumming sound but, just to be clear, that's not a bad thing.

Those instruments are layered progressively from the intro through to the chorus. The piano kicks things off, the drums come in, at the verse there's a bit of lead guitar then the strings come in for the bridge and the whole shebang for the chorus until it cuts out to start again for the second verse. There's one instrument I haven't mentioned: the bass guitar. It makes an appearance at the intro and then disappears until the end of the bridge! It comes in with the heavier percussion but, like the drums, it plods along at a leisurely pace. It stays for the second verse though, plodding along. The whole thing builds up to the chorus again then beyond to the middle-eight where there's a big more strings (which become more prominent through the song) and then there's the guitar solo before the final chorus maintains all that musical juiciness, only to drop it all at the end and leave piano, jazz guitar and jazz voice to finish. Lovely.

Thoughts and Conclusion

So there we have it... first ever title track in Hello! Project is a sweet ballad. Not that I could foresee it being anything else with a title like 「ダブル レインボウ」 but that's just me. I don't know what the art of a ballad is but one of the things that draws me is using a voice. Ballads are less without the voice such as 「First Love」 by 宇多田ヒカル which is such a beautiful song, but just sounded so much better when Aya sung it on 「みんなのテレビ」 6.5 years later. 「ダブル レインボウ」 (the song) wasn't Aya at her best but it's still a wonderful song.

This was the second 久保田さん song on the album and it surprised me how different it was to the other one of his that I'd heard at that point (「はレットイットビー」). That's not really much of comment but I'm out of things to say. I think I've gone over everything about the song already. But not only are his two songs different; all four songs so far are very different. However, at this point in the album people should be picking up a theme running through the songs. It's pretty distinct so I hope other people can see it although I believe I tend to pick up on this sort of thing more than the average person. In truth, there are still another four different types of songs to come (「むように・・・NAMIDA」, 「灯台」 and 「笑顔」 are all classic ballads (although 「笑顔」 is a bit atypical in subject matter), everything else is miscellaneous!) but they all carry the same theme. As you might have guessed, I'm not actually going to reveal it until the end. ^_^ Keep the suspense, keep the interest, although I don't think many people will be too concerned about it. Plus it's not particularly hard to spot anyway. All will be revealed in time but the one thing I will say is that the theme has something to do with rainbows!

Romaji (aka what causes ships to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle)

Otokotomodachi yo E wo kaite kurashiteiru wa
Urenakatta e wa Daiji ni jibun no heya no kabe

Serubia wo hitorikiri tabi shite
Aoi e no gu Hitofude kawaeta

Watashi ni wa totemo wakaranai keredo Aa
Kore de kansei sa to tsubuyaita
Watashi wa kokoro ni Iro wo kasenete mo mada
Kakikirenai e ga Aru

Kare no tomodachi wa Gitaa hiki Machi kara machi e to
Nomeba koushite Suteki na kyoku wo hora Kikasetekureru no yo

Donna ni tanoshisou ni shitete mo
Tsumabiku oto wa naze ka Setsunai hibiki

Watashi ni wa totemo wakaranai keredo Aa
Mukashi no kyoku sa tte Sarigenaku
Watashi wa kokoro ni Furueteru dake de mada
Naranai oto ga Aru

Jishin mo nakute Dare mo soba ni itekurenai toki
Sonna toki kimatte Koe wo kaketekuru

Watashi ni wa totemo wakaranai keredo Aa
Sore de ii n da to ittekureru
Watashi wa kokoro ni Mou sugu kansei suru
Taisetsu na e ga Aru


Back to the main page




Time

UNITED KINGDOM
日本

April 2024

M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
151617 18 192021
22232425262728
2930     

Recent Entries

想いあふれて

00. Index
01. 結婚しない二人
02. 七回歌うといいことがある歌
03. beautiful day
04. boomboomboom
05. 想いあふれて
06. レスキュー!レスキュー!
07. 中央改札
08. 真珠
09. Fallin'
10. きずな

Categories








AyaMiki
Aya Miki Love
Japan

Search My Blog

0 user(s) viewing

0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users