The words we exchanged casually
Have now turned into a monologue
The silence makes your scent,
the lingering memories of you,
Reverberate cruelly in my mind
If there are answers even in solitude
I’ll clear my ears, listen “one more time”
Because I’m going to search
to loosen the shoelace
that won’t, for the two of us, come undone
The words stuck harder than I had thought
Like a thorn concealed in a flower
Slowly, came the time
For scars to stay on our hearts
Page after page—I stopped turning them
I’ll stretch out my finger, one more time
The answer to the solution of a riddle
that I can’t solve alone
Let it burn into me
The summer day when I didn’t know tears from rain
Searching desperately for an excuse
And the day in winter too,
when our sighs hung in the air
like a white neon light
That I should not have forgotten, but did
If there are answers even in solitude
I’ll clear my ears, listen “one more time”
Because I’m going to search
to loosen the shoelace
that won’t, for the two of us, come undone
The summer day when I didn’t know tears from rain
Searching desperately for an excuse
And the day in winter too,
when our sighs hung in the air
like a white neon light
That I should not have forgotten, but did
The simple matter of wanting to be with you—
I couldn’t put it into words
I chose to be alone
The simple matter of wanting to be with you—
Realizing that
is what my heart is for
.
NOTES / INTERPRETATION:
Thoughts. One of my favourite tracks on IDEAL, the gentle yet uncertain tone of this ballad felt very unusual in the ALICE NINE. discography to me and the final verse is so vulnerable and beautiful in its relative simplicity. Over time I have come to think of the ballad in the subsequent album, SONATA, as being a natural continuation of this one, where there is reconnection of some sort as well as lovingly crafted words of support and music that feels just as pretty, soothing, and revitalizing, but there is still uncertainty in terms of how to bridge the distance and soothe the pain that has developed.
This song feels very down to earth and vulnerable, with no fantasy element in it. Listening to it, I always imagine a book laying open and forgotten on the speaker’s lap, of them sitting in a chair in a dark living room, the sun going down while lost in thought, alone in their home.
The shoelace as a symbol feels unusual, too. Interestingly, Saga wore a red braided silk cord that looked like a shoelace as a necklace as part of this era’s stage outfit. Despite that visual detail, however, there is no mention of what colour the shoelace is in these lyrics, and the red thread of fate is something that Shou has written into lyrics before — so the shoelace as a symbol is quite distinct and sits apart from that. The word for “loosen” in relation to the shoelace is the same word used to stand for a “solution” to the riddle that the speaker cannot solve, in a different verse.
One musical detail that I love about this song is in the “summer day” verse, where, even though the lyrics don’t specify it, the fact that backup vocals are sung here suggests a shared memory; that is my interpretation, in any case. You could otherwise read it as memories and experiences belonging to the speaker alone. The backup vocals support the last two verses too, suggesting that the speaker and the person they are thinking of are both alone, maybe thinking the same thing, hurting and missing one another but unable to reach out. By the end of the song, instead of a lone living room scene, it is as though there are two scenes side by side, two scenes of solitude in different places.
I don’t know what the answer is, but listening to this song feels like entering a moment of rumination where time seems as though it has been slowed down, thoughts floating and echoing (with the help of the backup vocals) where they should have flowed and interwoven freely.
.
アリス九號. ★ ALICE NINE.
ECHO
IDEAL (2017)
Lyrics by 将/Shou
Music by 将/Shou
Original text translated from Japanese.
Listen on itunes/Spotify.
If you’d like to share the translation, please link to this page; you can also find the translation posted as a comment to the official Youtube video. Do not repost it. Thank you ♡
Translation also on the Alice9Lives Archive.