Into the Stars
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCjYjrb3loQ[/media]
Into the Stars
I just wanna love
where I shed this body right off me
I just wanna love
where the past can't shape who I am
I can't escape these thoughts or these dreams of you leaving me
how stupid of me to give these lovely dreams to frightened nightmares
you take my heart to a place I want forever
this love is pulling me apart because I don't know who I am
you are all that I've dreamed of, you're showing me a way to heaven
I'm trying to fix it
please wait for me
I'll be better soon
I just wanna love
evils got a grip on my body
I just wanna love
what's taking me so long?
day comes night goes
you're standing still
I run off with the stars again.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Purple Sky Magazine: Interview with Olivia
PURPLE SKY MAGAZINE
WORDS BY BRIAN STEWART
The Lost Dolly
It’s hard to believe that the demure, waifishly slender girl sitting in front of me is the same Olivia Lufkin who rose to fame as OLIVIA, the exuberant standout of 90s Eurobeat Dance trio D&D (Dance & Dream). The baby fat is gone, the perky blonde locks darkened and she slouches like someone who spends a lot of time cradling herself. Her deep almond-shaped eyes remain the same, burning with the same wild passion. When Olivia speaks, she does so with a lilt reminiscent of Drew Barrymore. Her half-Japanese/half-German heritage revealed by only the faintest of accents.
At times during our interview, she seems caught in the webs of her mind, unable to communicate her heart; her words struggle to escape. It is only by way of her unflappable charm and careful manner that she is able to overcome this adversity.
Olivia’s triumphant resurgence this year with the hit single “a little pain” from the popular Nana animated series was a surprise to many. She had been written off after switching from Avex Trax to the independent label Cutting Edge. Her loyal fans would tell you that their Livi (one of the many terms of endearment she has engendered) was never gone, she was merely following a particularly mischievous rabbit down an especially dark hole. We caught up with her and her rabbit in L.A. at this year’s Pacific Media Expo. It was the first time she would be headlining an event for a predominantly English speaking audience.
The following is an account of her struggles with fame, her environment, a demanding music industry and her own brain.
Alone in her Castle
She could hardly contain her excitement over the connections she had made with her overseas fans at PMX. She was overwhelmed by the turnout at her autograph signing, regretting only that she did not have enough time to get better acquainted with her new friends.
“Oh it felt so good to get all the thumbs up from everyone out here. I wanted to talk to everyone more but the line was going so fast and I felt so bad, like, ‘Thank you. Thank you. Ohhhh.’ It felt like I was dreaming.”
She was equally moved by her first concert experience on U.S. soil. “It was such a great experience,” she gushes, “it was so great seeing my American fans singing along to my Japanese songs. The energy felt more aggressive than the Japanese audience.”
Being the daughter of a Japanese mother, I wrongly assumed that Olivia had been raised in a bilingual environment. She was quick to set me straight, “No, it was all English.”
Astonishingly, Olivia did not learn to speak or read Japanese until well into her music career and yet, it was in Japanese that she had always been expected to promote her works. “I’m really nervous actually because yesterday was my first time having an interview in English, I usually just speak to a couple people in Tokyo in English and it’s all mixed with Japanese.”
She was especially nervous during the fan panel she had hosted the day before. “I guess I’m just not used to speaking so much English to everybody. So it was kind of a strange experience.”
Olivia is often caught between two languages; her native-level English and her pidgin Japanese. She concedes, “When I speak Japanese I become more shy, I guess I seem more cute. I let people stomp on me easily.” She continues, “The thing is, I don’t know how to get angry or mad. Or just, not get angry, but show somebody that I’m upset in Japanese. Instead I just let things happen, and get annoyed.”
When I suggested that there might be some part of her that she can’t express in either of her languages she agreed, first with big goofball laughter, then with a resigned knowing chuckle.
“I don’t know I … sometimes I just can’t find the words for what I’m feeling. I don’t know if it’s ‘cause I’m, just like, not smart or…”
She pauses to negate her comment, “But I don’t know but, yeah, it’s hard for me to express myself. Actually I’m not really good at speaking and trying to explain something to somebody.”
It is through her music that she’s able to translate these thoughts and emotions into a language people can understand.
Whether it was a case of art imitating life or vice-versa, Olivia sees a lot of herself in her Nana counterpart Reira, the blonde half-Japanese songbird-in-the-cage who fronts Nana’s rival band Trapnest. She says of Reira, “I was really surprised when I got the part. I read the comic and I watched the movie and she (Reira) was the one character that I could really relate to. When I moved to Tokyo I was sixteen and I didn’t know any Japanese. I pretty much broke right away with D&D. I was put in the position where I couldn’t make friends and I felt really lonely and sad. I think that’s why I can relate to Reira ‘cause she’s a very bad communicator.”
Adding an exclamation point to the similarities, “She doesn’t have any friends.”
Olivia’s Song Digest: ”Color of your Spoon”
Olivia’s song titles are often playful. None more so than her 1999 single “Color of your Spoon.” As with most Olivia-speak there’s an engrossing story behind the name.
O: ”Color of your Spoon” means, when I was little my mom bought these new, we didn’t have that much money you know, my mom bought these new utensils with these spoons and I saw them when they were in the drawer and I was just like “Wow! They’re so beautiful!” This spoon, you know? So I stole this spoon and it was like, my treasure, you know? And just like, the way it shined and how when I looked into it my eye was upside down and just how like smoooooth it was and like, shiny it was …
pS: Were you on Ecstasy at the time?
O: (Laughing) No! But that’s like, it was the innocence of just like, loving that spoon.
The color. And so what I meant was like the reflection of my innocent eye in that spoon.
pS: That would have made a very difficult title to put on the single.
O: Yeah.
pS: And you wouldn’t have had much time to say it in the commercial copy … Olivia, new single, “Reflection of My Innocent Eye In That Spoon” …
O: (Laughing) Yeah. So that’s why it’s titled that way.
“I’m a very lonely kind of person. I’m alone a lot.” She said with a flat honesty. She even has a long distance relationship with her pets. “I used to have pets…” she said, a forlorn longing in her voice.
Are they gone now!?
She laughed, continuing, “Well, I had a Chihuahua at first but I was so busy I couldn’t take care of him. So I bought another dog. I thought that if there was two dogs in the house…” She pauses to let the logical flaws sink in, “And so I thought that would work out but instead it just became chaos. So I found a place and they have my dogs, this family, this old couple is taking very good care of them and they call me all the time, let me know when they have their shots, send me pictures, and I go visit them all the time so, it’s all good.”
Disarming the Dream Tickler
Language abandoned Olivia, leaving her without the means for expressing how she truly felt. but it wasn’t the only thing that contributed to her feelings of isolation. While in high school, she got her big break at the famous Okinawa Actor’s School. She sacrificed the normal life of a teenager in order to get closer to her dream.
“A part of me wishes that I did not start in my teens. That I went through high school and did the same things everyone else did. Because I think I missed out on a lot of stuff and I think I rushed. I rushed into it. I didn’t need to go, it would have happened sooner or later.”
It was the lack of those shared life experiences that distanced her from her peers. “Sometimes, I feel like I can’t connect with people in certain ways because I missed that part. It was really important, college and high school. It’s a very important part of your life … it just makes me feel distant from everyone.”
Are you closing the gap as time goes on?
“Uh, no. It feels like I’m getting more distant. I don’t know maybe it’s because I’m getting older but, I’m always battling with myself.”
In these internal struggles, Olivia admits that her “mind is winning at the moment” which she admits “is not good.”
Though she frames the struggle as an epic battle of mind versus heart, what it may boil down to is a simple case of thinking too much. On this she says, “When my mind takes over, when I’m identified with my mind like, you know, you get depressed you believe all these things that the calculator, that the brain that talks about yesterday is talking about and … f**k that.”
She appears invigorated by her declaration. “You know, it’s like f**k, why do you have to go back to the past that doesn’t even matter anymore.”
At the root of her mental claustrophobia is the very real version that exists as a part of everyday life in Tokyo, one of the world’s busiest cities. when you’re there, it’s as if no other place in the universe exists. Even the sky seems prisoner to an endless labyrinth of buildings and communication lines. Olivia, who calls Tokyo her home, sometimes find the place creatively suffocating.
Olivia’s Song Digest: ”a little pain”
From her recent Nana-inspired single comes another puzzling piece of Olivia speak that she somehow makes total sense of.
pS: What is a “dream tickler,” and how do I disarm it?
O: (laughing) “Disarm the dream tickler” means shutting off the brain so that you can hear your heart. The dream tickler is the thing that tickles your dream so you can’t figure out what you wanna do, you know? Your heart, it tickles your so you kind of, you’re like, “What do you wanna do? What do you wanna do?” So if you disarm the dream tickler then you can hear what your heart is saying what I mean.
“It’s very, very bad for me. Because like, it feels like you’re trapped and your mind goes on repeat. Well, my mind does. I think about the same things and I don’t come up with these original cool ideas. It takes a while for them to come up you know? Like I really gotta sit at my desk like ‘what should I do, what should I do?’ But when I’m out where there’s a lot of space and big sky and things are spread out, my mind has time to shut down and when that happens all these ideas come out,” she says.
The crazy atmosphere has influenced several songs in her catalog. A mental breakdown suffered at a popular trend spot in Shibuya’s wildly over-trafficked Hachiko Square lead to the blunt “sugarbloodsuckers.”
“I was freaked out and I saw all these billboards and all these people going to work and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’”
It was the visits she made to see her sibling sin L.A., Caroline and Jeff, that began the healing process. “When I was here in L.A. for two months, that’s how I got back on track to where I wanted to make music again. You know like, ‘Argh, what the f**k am I doing? Why am I taking a break? I wanna do this, what’s going on!?’ That’s why I went straight back to Tokyo right away, ‘cause I had all these ideas coming out. And I went back to Tokyo and I was back. So definitely - the space, nature, the big sky, the brain shutting down - that helps me a lot.”
Her return to Japan meant she would be subjecting herself to the same torture that drove her into hiding before. She seemed more willing to deal with it this time around, mainly because of her plans to travel more frequently - Germany (to see her parents), Thailand for winter because, “I can’t function int he winter ‘cause I’m really thin and when it gets cold my blood doesn’t circulate properly.”
Perhaps even her beloved oft-sung about outer space? “No, I can’t do that,” she said.
Good Land for Fake Flowers
Olivia’s transformation from dancing pop princes to tortured artist was not an overnight story, nor was it a carefully planned marketing strategy. The changes happened organically, in response to dwindling artistic freedom and the pressures the label was putting on her. After releasing her first album in 2000, Olivia started to fade from the public eye, releasing only a few singles until making a dramatic comeback in 2003 on a much smaller scale. The four genre-destroying mini albums that came out of this period were made and marketed to appeal to fans looking for an artist with cult appeal, selling only through Tower Records and with little promotion behind them.
When asked about the impetus behind her move from the softer rock of her early singles to the more hard rock sound of her mini albums, Olivia’s quick to answer.
“I just listen to a lot of music and keep picking up different types, so depending on what I’m listening to, I guess it kind of influences what I make.”
Regarding the mini album period she says, “The dark period, the rebellious, punkish period was because I was fed up with a lot of the businnes part of the music industry so like, I was having problems dealing with this society where I just had a lot of anger. I just started listening to a lot of crazy like, Nine Inch Nails and I was just in this very rebellious - I don’t know if you’d call it a slump. A phase?”
Olivia’s Lyrics Digest: ”Fake Flowers”
pS: Back to the lyrics for a moment. You said during the mini album period you were writing “me me me” songs. But, in The Lost Lolli there’s a song called “Fake Flowers,” not quite sure what it’s about, but the line, “Farmers in the Midwest need good land…,” I think you’re the first person from Japan to write about the farmer’s plight …
O: (guffaw) Well, … basically …
pS: Does that come from want to save the world?
O: Well it’s about, just like it’s about how artists like, you can’t make good art when you’re locked up in a box. And youc an’t make good art when you have these crazy deadlines and all these limits. You know what I mean? How’s it supposed to happen? And they expect you to do it. It’s my experience being in the music industry for such a long time. That’s what the song is about.
pS: do you feel pressure to constantly come up with new stuff for the label?
O: Yeah I did. Especially at that point. That’s why I wrote that song. After writing those mini albums all within a year … and then they’re like ‘Lost Lolli!’ so I just wrote that song.
Although Olivia doesn’t seem to sweat any of the bold musical choices she made during her rebellious phase, she does take issue with her lyrical output in retrospect.
“I think I was a very selfish lyric writer. Because um, I don’t know. I felt like I was always like, ‘me me me me me.’ Not really trying to help people or do something or inspire people. I hate that gloominess like that Nirvana like,” she puts on a gloomy voice making her face droopy to match, “‘Oooooh I’m depressed.’”
Her voice returning to normal, she continues, “Cause like when I went down and I heard songs like that, it really made me even sadder. I just thought like that’s not cool to be depressed. I don’t want kids to think it’s cool to be depressed and like suicidal. So just recently during that two-year hiatus, I just realized I wanted to write more, not spiritual, but things that can help people, things that can lift people up. Because when I was down, those were the songs that helped me.”
What song helped you when you were down?
Her face lights up as she gushes, “Oh my God! Bjork!”
If she were closer to me she would have hit me for not saying it first as if it was just something that everyone already knew. She says, “Like, all her songs, you know?”
The allure of doing for someone else what Bjork did for her seems to motivate Olivia now. Like a soldier who has been through the trenches, she’s eager to share her intimate knowledge of pain with others in hopes it helps them survive. Due to her new-found musical altruism, she is much more willing to meet the industry halfway. The new album The Cloudy Dream is a “A little Trapnest influenced.”
“I’m trying to reach more people this time, to make it more understandable. And you know, just for now, gradually maybe I can start doing more of what I want to do,” she says.
The keyword for the new album is “cool pop” - a compromise which sits well with Olivia. “Because of the Nana singles that just came out. At this point, if I jump out and do music that I really want to do or the music that I have a deep, deep passion for, I think people would be confused. The people that bought these CDs would be like, ‘No thank you.’ So um, what I want to do right now is make something understandable for everybody and write something that comes from my heart that can help and inspire people …. not make ‘bad’ pop but make ‘cool’ pop. Make ‘cool pop’ with a good message.”
Sugarbloodsucked
Olivia’s life resembles the fictional Reira in another negative way as well. Outside her apartment paparazzi wait with their cameras, hoping to make her a tabloid headline. She says, “The paparazzi are just killing me.”
Aside from some all-in-good fun exploits; dressing as an elf or batman on Halloween, enjoying a good chew on some of her house plants during a drinking binge (“…when I’m with my friends we’re like ‘Hey, I wonder what this tastes like, hmm?’ and we start eating plants”), Olivia is a homebody, choosing to stay inside where she can work on any of her many projects, from remaking jeans to creating odd creatures out of various materials. She seems completely disinterested in the celebrity lifestyle, and scoffs at the thought of driving around in a Rolls Royce.
“Oh god. The glamour, whatever. There’s a lot of things that are very surfacey, and it’s easy to get caught up in it, especially when you sell a lot.”
With her career back on track and perhaps stronger than ever, it seems like she would have the occasion to celebrate her success. She says, “Success to me is not selling records and making money. For me, success is like living the moment purely and just feeling what you feel and just living simply; just eating a meal and taking a bath. You know?”
Her humbleness is not just for show. It is the direct result of her protective siblings who have been her support group since the very beginning. She recalls the early days, “After I moved to Tokyo, they were still living in Okinawa and when I made it big with D&D hey came down here. We were still young back then, and they came here and they saw the craziness that I was in and they were just like, ‘Oh my god! This is just our Olivia.’ Like what the? And they were like protecting me and from like, that point we just kinda like grew really tight.”
Dreamcaught
Once the younger sister, Olivia now finds herself playing the role of the older, wiser sibling. She even feels up to speaking for her generation, offering guidance to elementary and middle school kids growing up today. She invites children of all ages to come to her concerts. “It’s very direct. There’s no filters. It’s just boom! Right there, you know? No Avex people standing in the way.”
She’s hoping to bring more music to the U.S. someday. “I’m working on many different kinds of music and have many different project ideas so when the time feels right then I will decide what kind of style I want to do in a band or solo, I don’ t know which type Olivia will be. Hopefully it’ll come in two or three years.”
And as for the future she says, “Yeah. I want to be more into the sound creating and sound designing of my music.”
She’d also like to get out of Tokyo, maybe move to Paris or L.A.
With all of these plans, including a new full length Trapnest-inspired album in February, the future is bright for Olivia Lufkin. Like the pink elephant brooch she wore to our interview - a ragged, discolored, patched-together thing that I mistook for an heirloom - she may look like she’s been through tough times, but her attitude is brand spankin’ new.
If the overwhelmingly positive response of the fans at the PMX show is any indication, she’s in for whole new worlds of communication. With her dream caught, her mind steadied, even the sky may not be the limit.
Olivia Approved
CD: Yoshii Kazuya - 39108
O: It’s pretty good, man. I was pretty amazed. The guitars, the mixing, oh my god. Definitely he did it in L.A., I’m sure.
Artist: Asai Kenichi
O: I like his live performances. He’s great. I feel this pureness, this sadness and innocence about him.
Movie: Dancer in the Dark
O: Yeah. That was really sad. I only watched it once that was enough for me. (lamenting) and I bought the DVD too!
Movie: Drawing Restraint Nine
O: Drawing Restraint Nine, the Matthew Barney movie. It’s Bjork’s husband. Oh you’ve gotta check out his stuff it’s fucking, it’s amazing. Like I mean after I watched, i mean he also has The Cremaster Cycle out too … but you gotta see it ‘cause um, as an artist I, after watching it, I thought “my god, I have to use my imagination more.”
***
Awesome interview!! Olivia is so wonderful.. Way to go! :wkiss
xo
.jpg)
