What's In?

There's a brief interview with Halcali in this months issue of What's In? magazine (issue 222). It's a fairly straightforward interview, but it's got a few interesting bits and pieces in there. I imagine that the magazine appearances are going to increase over the next couple of months along with the TTT promotions.

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-This is the first release we've had in a while. It's been, what, 1 year and 2 months?!

Yukari We're skating on thin ice I know, I'm sure everyone's forgotten about us! We're sorry to have kept you waiting, but we have something to reward you with.

Haruka- Yeah, the new Halcali!

- What were your first impressions after hearing Tip Taps Tip?

Y "This doesn't sound like Halcali". It felt more like a 'proper' song. The flow of the rapping felt different to how we've done it before too.

H I thought "Oh, Halcali are singing now..."

-What was that "oh"? Excitement or apprehension?

H A bit of both, I think. But when we were working on the demos I thought "you know, this is a really good song". I'm happy we could put out a song like this.

-The lyrics were written by U, but what themes are you singing about here?

Y Broadly speaking i'd say the themes were 'risk', 'adventure'...

H Or 'challenge', something like that. Fairly heavy stuff for us.

Y The working title for the song was 'nazo nazo' ('riddle'). So more generally speaking, there's the theme of the song; having a riddle and figuring out it's solution. The title Tip Taps Tip refers to 'ashibumi' (marching on the spot).

H So really it's about the fact that everyone has these riddles, these things in their life that need solving. The theme is 'don't give up until you've done it, don't be afraid of failure'.

Y I guess there's a lot of different messages in the song. Even though we've always said "there's no message in Halcali"!

- So you're saying we can experience the 'Halcali with a message' now?

Y Yeah. RYO-Z always had fun with the lyrics and wrote them in interesting ways, but I feel like U actually had a message to get across. That's why I thought "this is so different to what we've done before".

- If you compare the lyrics to what you've done before, they seem really adult.

Y That's good to hear! We're 17 and 18 now, adults! You can even see it with the rapping in this song too. It still feels genki, but also more laid back and relaxed.

- You're declaring the arrival of the new Halcali then?

H/Y Yes!!

- Let's talk about the b-sides. 'Pisdori' is a cute song.

Y The title is a mix of the words 'peace' and 'dream'. Like the title implies, it's the kind of song that makes you think 'peace', you know. Images of the blue sky come to mind, that sort of thing.

- What about 'Halcali 'n' Bass'? This is the first time you have written all the lyrics yourself right?

H Yeah, we thought it was time we tried it ourselves.

Y The theme of it is just what we feel is happening with us right now, taking the next step up, moving on and so on. I don't know whether we overreached ourselves with that though! We wrote it together, but we were always going off on tangents. We were arguing like "no, not like that, that's not right!". But we really tried hard with it, and everything on Tip Taps Tip. So go on everyone, check it out!