Discussion topic for Track 12 of Love Song: Soshite Monogatari ga Owaru (Thus the Story Concluded). Please support the official release by purchasing the album from iTunes! You can find a translation of the lyrics on ShiraneHito’s blog.
Please tag references to later songs or outside works with the [spoiler] tag, providing adequate context in parenthesis.
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So I just want to note that this song gets me very very emotional, and I expect some controversy over what exactly it is about in our podcast!
No shit, I fucking bawl my eyes out at this song. It’s 100% concentrated Maeda juice with the flower fields and trains, you know. This is just the very last bit of a long journey, but it’s such a damn good narrative. We have two stories intertwined. One is that of the fading dream going from a vast space to a voice and finally to just a gentle touch. Driven by these dreams, we have the boy yearning, and eventually achieving, to love. Presumably, he speaks about loving himself after all the mistakes he committed in grieving the girl’s passing which he told us about in the previous songs.
This song… wow. I think it might be my new favorite on the album. I was particularly surprised by how well the electric guitar fit the feeling this song hoped to evoke. An amazing way to conclude this story (mostly, anyways. I’m curious to see what track 13 is.)
Although the picture would suggest otherwise, (also cool that the location depicted in track 1’s illustration is once again here, albeit from a different angle, clearly connecting these songs), I actually feel this song is entirely from the girl’s perspective. Her seeing a dream as she falls into the blue, in my mind, is a parallel to her physical death. Unlike from the boy’s perspective, however, she finds herself calmly fading away as she’s accepted her death, hence the mention of the sea and the sky being eternal.
The tone of the song’s lyrics also feel more like how the girl would feel about the boy. In how openly emotional he is, and how confused and desperately he tried to stay motivated for her, I feel it would make sense for her to describe him as “precious”.Perhaps laughing together in particular is so precious because as a grim pessimist, he rarely laughed at first. Maybe the reference to a painful life refers to her struggles with terminal illness that we discussed, which also makes the lyric about her “shedding tears and blood” a bit more literal. Her life is so painful and so full of challenges because of how long she has been weak. Maybe her goal of wanting to love is a reference to the emotional clinginess we saw in track 2. I wasn’t sure to make of the gentle voice that isn’t human, but I imagine it’s the voice that beckons her to pass on.
The eternity they were closed in, I imagine, refers to the love they share. Once they started, it wasn’t something that was ever going to disappear, even if the world itself tried to tear them apart. Finally, her last dream, a radiant one, is the reality of her passing finally catching up.
It’s a bit far-fetched, as this would be an odd point to swerve back that far chronologically, and this evidence could easily be used to suggest this is from the boy’s perspective, but this is what I see from it.
Well now, if anything hinted at this album being one whole story, then this might as well be the dangling-in-your-face type if hint. While I’m not too fond of the song composition-wise, this does feel like an extremely emotional song. And not the kind that makes you sad, no; this delivers what Maeda does best: the catharsis.
The boy finally learns to accept everything. He learns to accept her death. He learns to accept being an incomplete person after her. He learns to accept that she. Is. Gone. But there are no regrets. If anything, he is probably happy. Happy that he was given the chance to love and be loved.
So comes in the age-old adage: 'tis better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all.
Another Demo from Maeda. I like this version better, actually, because of drums.
https://twitter.com/jun_tenhou/status/832604872679657474
