Es VOL.16 The musician to the musician plus 第 10 回 Hirohito Furui(second half)

●○○From music freak Es Vol.16

I could get excited talking about Western music with the Western-music fans, then join the circle of people who liked Japanese music and get excited talking about Japanese music. I listened to music by thinking, “This song is good!”, rather than by genre or artist name, so I was always flexible in that sense—broad rather than deep. Once I reached high school, I also started playing original songs I had composed myself.

●You are strongly associated with being a keyboardist and arranger, but you compose as well, right?
GARNET CROW has a clearly defined division of roles, so I do not compose GARNET CROW songs. Even now, though, I compose things in a hobbyist way whenever I feel like it.

●When did you start composing?
Probably when I was in high school. There comes a point in a band when you think, “Don’t we want to start playing our own originals?” So we began performing songs we had written. But I had already been recording melodies that came to me freely while playing keyboards since middle school. It happened naturally. They were essentially instrumentals, I suppose, but I enjoyed making them by myself (laughs).

●Were you arranging songs from the time you formed a band in high school?
It was not anything as grand as arranging. In my student days, it was what you would call live arrangements. For example, I might ask the drummer, “I want a rhythm like this,” and they would suggest, “How about something like this?” It was a very dependent kind of arrangement.

●You are strongly associated with arranging. How did you come to arrange professionally?
There were many roots. For example, discovering TOTO showed me how cool it was for studio musicians to be in a band, and through that I encountered Jeff Porcaro and David Bowie. I also learned that David Foster had produced Daryl Hall & John Oates and many other artists, and I began to admire producers. With Janet Jackson, I became interested in Jam & Lewis among all the producers involved, and listened obsessively to everything they had worked on. I thought Babyface was cool too. Rather than focusing on whose song it was, I began focusing on who had been involved in it.

I think that also connects with the company I belong to, Being/GIZA. There was a period when I insisted that I wanted to pursue things as a band, and I entered auditions with amateur bands, but the more I entered, the more walls I ran into. In other words, you cannot get by in this world just by being a group of good friends. At the time, I wanted to continue with the same members if possible, but it was difficult to have an entire band accepted. Eventually, I reached a point where I could not keep standing still as an individual either. That was when a director at the company I currently belong to approached me, saying, “It seems you also do sequencing with equipment, so why not think seriously about arranging?” I realized then that I had to think more seriously about constructing sound myself, and from that point I began arranging in earnest.

So I may have started fairly late. Once I began, I found it very deep and far from easy. Fortunately, I had accumulated a lot of equipment little by little, so I kept experimenting and trying things out. This was before Pro Tools and the like, and Macintosh computers were expensive, so I used a piece of equipment called a sequencer. As I continued, I reached the point of thinking, “Professionals use Macintosh, after all,” and forced myself to buy one. It was incredibly expensive, yet the screen was so small (laughs). With help from many people, I kept improving my skills.

After a while, I began thinking, “An artist needs individuality.” As I said earlier, I was not the type to develop an intense love for one particular kind of music or one artist. I liked many kinds of music broadly, which also meant that I had no distinctive identity. For example, even if I arranged dance music, I could not compete with someone who worked exclusively in dance music. I had no particular specialty, and people probably could not quite see what they should ask me to do. So for a while I deliberately devoted myself to the world of AOR. Eventually people started saying, “If you have him do something AOR-like, he’s actually pretty good.” At that point, I felt as though I had cleared one of the challenges within myself.

●Why did you turn to AOR?
I thought it contained many different elements, with a broad range of genres in many senses. Some of it is strongly rock-oriented, while some of it leans a little toward black music. I thought it would make the best use of the way I had engaged with music up to that point.

●Since then, you have worked on a truly wide range of arrangements. You are also active as a member of GARNET CROW.
It feels strange. The same is true of my arranging work, but I have a very strong feeling that I got this far because I was blessed with the people around me and everyone treated me so well. With GARNET CROW, I had previously been invited to appear on television and at live shows as a support member, but this involved a different kind of responsibility. Little by little, I began to feel the weight of being responsible as a member of the band.

●GARNET CROW celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. What do you think is the secret to having continued this long?
Everyone takes pride in their own position, and there are times when the members compete with one another. At the same time, in a sense we are adults, with a cool side to us as well. I strongly feel that we could not have continued with any other four people. For example, Hitoshi Okamoto can write songs himself, but in GARNET CROW’s work he maintains the role of guitarist and contributes within that role. Each of us takes responsibility for our own part. Usually, when a band does something together, you need a meeting beforehand, right? But we do not do that at all (laughs). No one has absolute authority, either. We have been able to continue because there is an unspoken understanding: not that we are walking on eggshells, but that we are considerate of one another.

●What kind of activities would you like to pursue in the future?
When I am asked to arrange something, of course I want to be useful to everyone, but I also have a desire to create work that expresses who I am. I have no concrete plans at all, but if the opportunity arises, I would like to try making various tracks or find something new I can do that will stimulate me creatively. I am always thinking about that.

●Finally, what is something you will never compromise on when making music?
It may not be the right attitude from a business perspective, but I do not want to release anything that I would not want to listen to later or that I cannot accept as satisfactory. Of course, when I look back after time has passed, there are things that make me think, “Ah, that was like that,” but in the moment of creation, I do not want to draw a line based on time, regardless of whose work it is. Since it is a job, there are naturally deadlines and constraints. But in terms of my feelings, I want to avoid compromising with myself and always put out work I can be satisfied with.