ayu said she never wanted to be a singer and never considered a career path like that even when max matsuura discovered her. that statement is very confusing, seeing that she did have many TV appearances pretty avex (and that nothing from nothing album)

and yeah, her voice is miles better than on a song for xx.

IMO those tv appearances and NOTHING FROM NOTHING were just activities as an "Idol" or "gravure model", music wasn't the intention as a career. Avex and Max approached and encouraged her to be a "recording artist".

^ That's what I see from it as well. She was an Idol who sang, not a singer.

STEP you/is this LOVE? is 10 years and 4 months old...

Oh god how time flies, one can't even describe.

I feel old :tipsy

I finally got around to watching Beautiful Fighters PV. I don't know how I never got around to it before but...

...I was cracking up laughing. I think that may be my new favorite PV of hers. XD It has the kind of quirky humor that really gets me.

How do you get a hold of old stuff like that? The world of J-Pop continues to fascinate me...

I went to a Japanese restaurant with my coworkers for lunch today and Ayu's "Seasons" started playing there, I was excited. It's nice to hear Ayu in Russia:-)

Funny...I became a fan around this time, I can remember the My Names WOMAN PV being uploaded to the old Ayunite forum and downloading the TV rip of the Fairyland PV...it took me ages to get my head around the amount of releases and previous PVs to watch at the time..fuck..a whole decade later and I've been a fan for more than half of her career, yet I felt like I missed out on so much in the 7 years before I knew her...

I got to know ayu and became a fan between No way to say's and Memorial address' release. It took some time for me to reveal she has released a lot of stuff already, her status in Japan and who she is. Most songs I found on the net on that time were mainly from A Song for xx, LOVEppears and Duty.

Until I digged more of her I heard only Depend on you for a whole month.

Time surely does fly! :cry

LOOL a near spitting image of our friend Ayu.

The impersonations are almost always 2001-Ayu.

I wish they'd do Trauma and forget every other lyric.

http://www.tv-asahi.co.jp/music/sec/...p_enquete.html

Music Station opens an enquete with the theme "J-POP that Japan is proud of" (sorry for my bad translation) and they would like you to submit a song you think can represent it. Let's submit Ayu's songs! I submitted SEASONS.

^ you should totally create a new thread for it! I just submitted evolution!

I was listening to Real Me the other day and I remembered how I keep hearing "full moon hit me like a dog/full moon hit me like a log" and then I thought about everyone saying something about ayu saying 'bilive' or something. Is that from the ending monologue of sayonara or something? All I hear is her saying "bul lai wanna buhleave". Just sounds like she had trouble with the end of "but" and the "I". It's probably due to how that transition almost makes an alveolar flap (try saying "but i" really fast. Sounds like you're sayinh a "D" almost if you flap your Ts. Same thing with "city" and "water" sounding like "cidy" and "wader" respectively). It's weird because the japanese R is basically almost an alveolar in position and in Japanese music it's basically that L and R are interchangeable at the beginning of a word or syllable. Just ask namie amuro (rearry, balelina, lope, crock, etc). But hearing ayu make an L sound at the end of the word? I've heard Namie doing it but it's something I can't explain. Maybe it's difficult for them to make the English alveolar flap and have to approximate to the Japanese R/L and its position that is CLOSE but NOT EQUAL to the English one.

The bilive thing is like... maybe ayu didn't use a schwa sound (say "appalled" and stress the second syllable. That "uh" for the first sound is a schwa and doesn't exist in Japanese).
This is just me rambling on. I can see why I have a linguistics degree lol.

^^ that's really cool! I submitted SEASONS too :)

Reading old interviews with Ayu from back then (I'll have to get some of them properly translated), she actually used to be REALLY self-conscious about how "husky" her voice was. (Something I can relate to)... So then when Max Matsuura discovered her, higher-pitched voices were popular at the time so he had her singing stuff like Tomomi Kahala at karaoke. So her higher-pitched vocal style from her early avex years is probably the result of a bunch of insecurity about her deeper voice not being "good enough."

^Or they just adapted her to the market...