[emi♡]

^thanks

so yeah, I had my own theory on RAINBOW, which I said above. But I've never been fully comfortable with it because it's based on her releases and what I know of them, and a lot on people and what they say, what I've heard, and so on.

So...I asked Delirium-Zero, what was her take on the subject, and with her permission, I will post it.

And yeah, when RAINBOW was released, it was kinda weird cuz... the album was just COMPLETELY different than any of us expected it to be. While songs like "Free & Easy" and "HANABI" were REALLY different from previous stuff, you could kinda tell from the singles that ayu seemed to be continuing the "raw" sound that "I am..." had. The new tracks were all really well-put-together, but still kinda raw and in a way, dark, you know? So when RAINBOW came out, those of us who loved "I am..."'s raw sound, and the raw sound reflected in songs like "independent", "Free & Easy", and "everywhere nowhere"'s CM version which was less polished, and "Heartplace" which we'd also heard in a CM at that point... we were just REALLY disappointed with how the album tracks like "WE WISH", "Real me", "Dolls" and such sounded. The polished, overproduced sound of RAINBOW was not at all what we expected or hoped for, and alot of us felt like it was a step backwards. (As I recall, "Heartplace" and "everywhere nowhere" were really the only album tracks that everyone seemed to agree that they liked)

The english lyrics coming into her songs felt wrong too. She'd said in interviews that she didn't like to do it, and to us, english lyrics were something that more sellout-type pop singers did. To have ayu do it was like.... I dunno, it just didn't feel right, and lots of us were kinda jarred & upset by it. Like ayu was selling out to sell better or "fit in" with other pop singers. It felt like something avex told her to do.

In retrospect though, aside from "Close to you" and "+", there's not a single song on the album that I skip. It's not really overproduced, just overproduced compared to what we were expecting at the time.

To this day, however, I do think that songs like "Free & Easy", "Heartplace" and "independent" stick out like a sore thumb compared to the "shiny" sound of the rest of the album, which makes the album as a whole still feel awkward and unfinished to me.

So there's my input on RAINBOW.

Thanks to Deli for that