#45 – Watercolor World

In case you missed it, our English cover of Suisai Sekai. And as usual, references.

In my previous post, I mentioned that Suisai Sekai is one of the songs that really hooked me onto Cerise Bouquet early on. Compared to Holiday Holiday, it’s a much more… vivid song. Its lyrics evoke a lot of watercolor imagery (hence the title?!) and I wrote lyrics to reflect that

For example, in the first verse, I leaned heavily into the brush and water imagery. This section gives me the image of how, as a kid, I’d wash off my brush in a cup of water in between colours. In the end, the water would become a murky mess and I would worry that the spoiled water would interfere with my final painting.

Right afterwards, I used “blotted” to describe that imprecise glob that occurs on canvas when the brush carries excess water. I felt the imprecise nature reflected “feelings with no title.” I was tempted here to replace “no title” with “nameless” but it felt to me like “title” was more appropriate when describing what we call an art piece.

The hardest part was by far creating an introduction that made sense while having it match up with the first line of the chorus.

Intro 私と君の今を繋ぐ Watashi to kimi no ima o tsunagu

1st Chorus 私と君の色をのせて Watashi to kimi no iro o nosete

They’re quite similar in structure and share the same initial phrasing. This connection drove me crazy – I’ve always struggled with “watashi to kimi…” as I’ve personally not found an eloquent way to express it in English.

The double whammy is that “watashi no ima / kimi no ima” always seems lost in translation to me when translated to “my now (present) / your now (present)”. I see this phrase often in Japanese lyrics but it’s not in the English song-writing vocabulary (or even spoken vocabulary).

In any case, I did what I could! I maintained some parallelism through the use of “Your _____ and mine, intertwine(d)…”

It turned out OK, right?

I will wrap up here. I really hope my lyrics did the song justice because I love it so much. I do have one more Cerise Bouquet video in the works, so stay tuned!