page_title: Go to the Future
section_title: Writing and production
hierarchical_section_title: Go to the Future / Writing and production
caption_attribution_description: English: The Sapporo Lifelong Learning Center (Sapporo-shi shōgai gakushū sentā), also known as Chieria, pictured in 2007. 日本語: 札幌市生涯学習センター (ちえりあ) 2007年.
context_page_description: Go to the Future is the debut studio album by Japanese band Sakanaction. It was released on May 9, 2007 through Victor Entertainment sub-label BabeStar. Recorded and produced in the band's native Hokkaido in a month, the album compiled the band's early songs, including compositions from the band's vocalist Ichiro Yamaguchi's high-school band Dutchman. The album mixed electronic and rock music conventions, and featured live instruments as a way to conceptually separate the album from pure dance music.
  Though not commercially successful nationally, the album was well received in Hokkaido. The leading song of the album, "Mikazuki Sunset", received strong airplay by radio stations such as FM North Wave and FM Hokkaido. Critics praised the album, noting Yamaguchi's distinct vocals and the band's varied electronic and rock sound.
  In 2009, the album was made available globally as a digital download, alongside the band's second and third albums Night Fishing and Shin-shiro. In 2015, the album was reissued on CD, LP record and lossless digital formats.
context_section_description: The album was recorded at two locations in Sapporo, Studio Jack at the Yamaha Center in Chūō-ku, and at Chieria Studio in the Sapporo Lifelong Learning Center in Nishi-ku. After it was commissioned, the album took only a month to produce, as Sakanaction mostly reworked demos they had already produced to create an album. Only the song "Yoru no Higashigawa" was written specifically for the album. Two of the songs had been released by Yamaguchi's first band Dutchman, "Inner World" in 2002 and "Mikazuki Sunset" in 2003. As a soloist, Yamaguchi released a remix of the song "Shiranami Top Water" on the compilation album Music for Pardisco in 2004. Retrospectively, Yamaguchi said that Go to the Future felt like a business card for Sakanaction, due to the album being a compilation of already created songs.
  The album was recorded and produced entirely in Hokkaido, including the album's cover artwork and music videos. When writing the songs, Yamaguchi thought up imagery for each song, and asked the other band members to picture this while creating and performing the songs. Yamaguchi created the album's music and melody while thinking about how they would be received by other people, but wrote the lyrics entirely introspectively. "Mikazuki Sunset" and "Shiranami Top Water" were the first songs produced by the band, and were the band's first attempts at making club-style music. Due to their success on college radio, Yamaguchi felt like this was proof that the mix of dance music with Japanese melodies was a good direction, and continued to make music in this style. Yamaguchi was inspired by the differences in house and techno music styles when writing the album. Yamaguchi was mindful about how to reach a wide audience, and considered that live instruments were important to stress how the album was rock music, as pure dance music was based on electronic and sampled instruments. One convention the band kept for the album was to record everything at 126BPM, to make it easier for the band's drummer, who had not experienced performing dance music before.
  Yamaguchi considered folky melodies on top of techno and house music the core of Sakanaction's sound on Go to the Future. In a retrospective interview conducted with Rockin' On Japan in 2011, Yamaguchi felt that his need to construct his own personal musical vision was too strong, and felt like the other members of Sakanaction had too little say in the album's content. "Amefura" was the first song that Sakanaction worked on together as a five-piece band, and was created to be a playful song mixing American and French styles. "Go to the Future" was originally an acoustic song, that grew into a triple metre song when the band developed their electronic sound. The song as the band originally envisioned it was re-recorded for their 2015 compilation album Natsukashii Tsuki wa Atarashii Tsuki: Coupling & Remix Works. Footage on the visual media disc of the album shows Yamaguchi and Iwadera returning to the studio where they had originally performed the song in Sapporo, to recreate the song. The published version of the song "Fukurō" found on the album used the ad-libbed lyrics Yamguchi had created while composing the guitar chords of the song.
caption: The album was recorded at two locations in Sapporo, the Sapporo Lifelong Learning Center (pictured) and the Yamaha Center.
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