Lia -- Tori no Uta（鳥の詩）

 

Before the pandemic struck two years ago, I used to mention on the blog that I had those biweekly food-and-anime sessions on Sundays with my anime buddy at his place. It was brunch somewhere (dim sum or diner), a few hours of anime, about an hour or so of anison listening, a break at a café nearby, a few more hours of anime, dinner (sky's the limit), and then a couple of more hours before calling it a night. We and some of our other friends dubbed those sessions The Routine. And without them, I wouldn't have known about shows such as "Joshiraku"（じょしらく）, "Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka?"（ご注文はうさぎですか？） and even the recent blockbuster franchise "Kaguya-sama: Love is War".

Regarding the anison hour, the songs that were put out through the speakers had some of the old favourites but there were others that were new to me. Admittedly a few of them didn't particularly click but there were others that did resonate, and during the near decade that I got to sit and hear those tunes, some of those were ones that I never asked about in terms of their origins; I just sat back and enjoyed them. In fact, they were so enjoyable, I managed to doze off for several minutes.

One of those mystery tunes is the topic of this article. It sounded as if it had come straight out of the mid to late 1990s since there was something rather reminiscent of Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）whose star was skyrocketing at the time. But of course, the voice here was different (lower and more buttery) but there was that urgent techno beat and overall adventure-friendly coolness in how it was all put together. It turns out that the title was "Tori no Uta" (Bird's Poem), the theme song for a visual novel titled "Air" released in September 2000 by the studio Key. It was written by Jun Maeda（麻枝准）and composed by Shinji Orito（折戸伸治）.

The novel was adapted into a 2005 anime with the same title with the same music including "Tori no Uta". Man, I keep forgetting how the animators really liked to blow up the eyes back then. In any case, "Tori no Uta" was sung by Tokyo-born singer-songwriter Lia who attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston before moving to Los Angeles, and in what seems like a turn of fate, she'd been working as a translator between recording staff and the publishing company Visual Arts (which oversees Key) when she was asked to fill in for an absent singer, and she ended up recording "Tori no Uta" at Paramount Studios.

"Tori no Uta" is available on "Air Original Soundtrack" which was released in September 2002 but it's also on another album dedicated toward the music of "Air", "Ornithopter", which came out in July 2000.