page_title: Sayonara wa Emotion
section_title: Writing and inspiration
hierarchical_section_title: Sayonara wa Emotion / Writing and inspiration
caption_attribution_description: Robert Glasper at the Newport Jazz Festival, August, 2006
context_page_description: "Sayonara wa Emotion" is a song by Japanese band Sakanaction. Initially used as a 2013 jingle for the yobikō Tōshin High School, the song was recorded in full a year later. It was released on October 29, 2014, as a double A-side single with the song "Hasu no Hana".
context_section_description: The band first recorded "Sayonara wa Emotion" because of Tōshin High School's request for a song for their commercials in 2013. The band envisioned it as a song to perform at festivals, such as they had done with "Identity" (2010) and "Aoi" (2013). After making two verses and a chorus for the commercial, the band shelved the song, as Yamaguchi had become sick of creating emo rock style songs. The initial take of the song was a halftone lower, used different verses and had different lyrics. The song at this demo stage was given the demo title "Sayonara Emotion" (さよならエモーション).
  Yamaguchi attempted to keep working on the song after submitting it for the commercial, but suffered from writer's block, and instead worked on the songs "Eureka" and "Good-Bye". The song was revisited when the band was contacted to write a song for the film Close Range Love (2014), called "Hasu no Hana". The band discussed releasing "Hasu no Hana" and "Sayonara wa Emotion" as a single with their management at Victor Entertainment, who agreed to the idea. The song was entirely rearranged and re-recorded for its 2014 release, based around only the initial version's chorus, with the original verses removed in favor of new ones. Instead of the synth sounds present in the band's other music and the commercial version of the song, Yamaguchi wanted "Sayonara wa Emotion" to have a live rock band sound. Yamaguchi felt that by recording the song in this manner, it had lost its summer music festival-like vibe. During the recording process, Yamaguchi incorporated a wide dynamic range, having felt influenced by listening to jazz and neo soul musicians Robert Glasper and Taylor McFerrin.
  The song was recorded at Aobadai Studio in Meguro, Tokyo, in a single take, as a method to retain an emotional feel to the song. The band experimented with the song in demo sessions recorded by their regular recording engineer Masashi Uramoto, while Yamaguchi ad-libbed material. One take of the song was recorded by the project's assistant engineer, Ayaka Toki. The band liked the dynamic nature of her mix, feeling it had a strong indie rock sound, feeling it was similar to a rough recording by an independent band with little sound processing and equalization, and asked Toki to become the leading engineer for the song. The band asked Toki to retain the rough sound of the song for the final mix, believing it was beneficial to expressing the song's dynamic range. The band did not use any of the recording booths at Aobadai Studio, instead recorded in the control room while Toki sat next to the band. As Sakanaction member Ami Kusakari was ill during the recording, the take did not include bass guitar. The other band members felt that this created a strange vibe in the recording studio, as they were used to Kusakari's bassline being the basis for their songs. After her condition improved, Kusakari overdubbed her bass guitar parts into the song.
  Lyrically, the song's theme was describing the literal reality of living in Tokyo. This was compared to his previous Tokyo themed songs "Good-Bye" and "Eureka", where the former described Yamaguchi's decision to continue to make music in Tokyo, and the latter was a description of Yamaguchi continuing to live in Tokyo while remembering his home town. The first stanza, describing somebody going to a convenience store late at night, buying a canned coffee and throwing away the receipt, took Yamaguchi the longest time to write. He found that after reaching this point, the remaining lyrics only took a day and a half to finish. He felt that by following the simple description scene with the phrase "sayonara wa emotion", without explicitly linking the two, would mean that listeners would color the scene with the chorus' emotion. Yamaguchi saw this implicit technique being like the lyrical style of 1980s and 1990s lyricists Takashi Matsumoto, Takao Kisugi and Shozo Ise. He wanted the song to evoke the "real" feeling of music from this period, such as by musician Yumi Matsutoya, and felt that the song's title evoked the Shōwa period.
caption: Jazz pianist Robert Glasper inspired Ichiro Yamaguchi to incorporate a dynamic sound range into "Sayonara wa Emotion".
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