[Love Song]
I’m trying to look at how all the songs work together in sequence. It’s kinda like analyzing the plot/pacing of a conventional story. I found that there are some pretty distinct “arcs.” Tracks 1-4 mainly establish basic information like the MC’s emotions and that the girl is dead. Tracks 5-7 give a lot more specific details, though it’s up to interpretation how many of them you believe should be taken literally. There’s a lot of focus on the couple’s childhood, and that culminates in a sort of mini arc about the girl’s death in tracks 8-9. After all that information, tracks 10-12 build upon that to tells a consecutive narrative about reconciliation and acceptance. Finally, track 13 is a form of afterword helping with details and interpretations of the previous songs. (We had Biz to do that though.) So if we illustrate the structure of these arcs, it’d be like this.
1-4: Basic information and emotions
5-7: Backstory
↳8-9: Reactions to the girl’s death
10-12: Apotheosis
13: Afterword
That’s basically a three act structure right there. It even places the central moment that decides everything two thirds in so it’s closer to where a climax would be even though it happened way earlier chronologically.
Of course, the original idea I had was to look at songs individually, so let’s do that.
Hajimari no Saka starts us off at a very normal point. There’s nothing otherworldly and we’re seemingly in modern society. Storywise, we only learn that the couple will “end” which is a very open statement. There are of course a lot of things that could be seen as foreshadowing. Emotionally the song is somber, but not necessarily anything extreme. Basically, it lays a good ground to start from.
Ao no Yume is an immediate peak in engagement. It’s faster, less logical and has a spooky ending. It also has the line about the girl never waking anymore, so she’s dead at 90% certainty.
After that we get to the part that confuses me. Both Hoshi ni Naru Ishi and Hashiru seem like songs that are building up to something. I also think the two are very similar in that they focus on a search, though Hoshi ni Naru Ishi starts giving details on the couple’s childhood. There’s nothing wrong with them both being build up, but the next song isn’t really a payoff as much as it shifts gears completely.
Hyakunen no Natsu is a lot slower and has more power in it’s vocals compared to Hashiru. As I said, this is also where we start learning about the backstory along with the next track. This and Bokura no Koi actually are very similar and work well together. They are both narratives about the two spending time together that are shown to be retrospective towards the end. I think that’s perfect because I’d argue that the entire album is retrospective. That’s kind of how death works: It’s bad to lose someone, but the worse part is how they stay dead after that. These retrospectives are of course building up to the actual death. We hear about what happened before and after, but the further we go, the closer we’re getting to that fateful moment.
Haiiro no Hane is a middle ground between the retrospective build up and disaster.
Gramophone and Shinwa is what all that build up gives us. They are far removed from the situation as if we’re avoiding the truth. However, they obviously revolve around great pain represented by the machine destroying itself and the world ending. These songs also have tons of sound going on. Shinwa in particular is a very stressful song.
Beyond that stress lies Kooridokei, a song about false acceptance and the first part of the final plot. The song leads up to a moment of realization that MC is going about this in the completely wrong fashion. That moment is what I feel is encapsulated in the next two songs. After the realization that something is wrong, we accept that the illusion is just that in Orenai Tsubasa, and then the MC learns to accept himself in the song that has way too long of a titleSoshite Monogatari ga Owaru.
So with only that little sudden transition between tracks 4 and 5, I think this is a really good engagement curve. I’m not the best at analyzing music, so maybe those who are can add something to this?
