AAAMYYY -- TAKES TIME

 

Years ago, when I was not only living in Chiba Prefecture but also making the biannual pilgrimages back home here for the Holidays, I made my usual round-trip reservations with Air Canada and got my requested aisle seat. I don't particularly care for squishing my fellow seatmates if I had to get out of a window seat to head to the washroom.

Anyways, I went to Narita Airport and checked in when the staffer at the desk asked me if I would change seats with another passenger. I agreed on condition that I would still be in an aisle seat; she assured me that I would, and even better, I got the aisle seat right near a door which got me plenty of leg room, something that I had to usually and painfully sacrifice during my twelve hours of flight time. I wondered what I'd done to merit that sort of treatment, and knowing that an upgrade to Business class was all but impossible, I think even getting more leg room was a wonderful stroke of luck. 

Well, when I finally reached Pearson Airport in Toronto feeling somewhat weary, I went down the stairs into the terminal and at the bottom, there was a young Air Canada staffer just beaming up at me. Feeling a little awkward initially, expressions such as "Honestly, officer, I didn't touch her...really!" popped up in my head, but then the clarity of recognition crashed into my head. The staffer was once my student at the second English-language school that I taught at! It was quite the delightful reunion and she was the one who had seen my name and put me into a better seat. We took the nice slow walk to Immigration as we quickly exchanged information on what we'd been doing in the few years since her graduation from the school. 

Hey, teach a few good lessons and the rewards can be bountiful!

I introduced my Air Canada story because I found out that the singer of this song had tried to become a flight attendant for my nation's main air carrier herself. AAAMYYY is known in legal documents as Honami "Amy" Furuhara from Nagano Prefecture, and according to her Wikipedia profile, she was a high school exchange student in Canada in 2008, which led her to the Kanda University of International Studies where she intensely practiced English so that she could train at the flight attendant school for Air Canada in Vancouver. 

Well, that didn't quite pan out resulting in a return to Japan, but during her first time in the Great White North, she also gained inspiration to try music thanks to music acts such as M.I.A. and T-Pain. Plus, she did what I had done: become an English conversation teacher in Osaka. But eventually, she let her muse take her into a music career, specifically into electropop with various bands and also as a soloist known as AAAMYYY. 

Starting in the mid-2010s, her first releases came out in 2017 with a first album, "Body", being released in 2020. Her second album was "Annihilation" released in August 2021 and one of the tracks was "TAKES TIME". The rhythms fairly thrum throughout accompanied by AAAMYYY's sultry and slightly raspy vocals, and there is this mix of the past and present in technopop as I listen to "TAKES TIME". 

I've noticed from her J-Wiki profile that AAAMYYY has worked with folks such as hip-hop artist Ryohu from KANDYTOWN and musician TENDRE. In fact, according to the description under the above YouTube video, the latter was acting as bassist and chorus for "TAKES TIME".