KIREI (feat. YJ)

Original by Brian Cao, aka Brian the Amateur

(Listen at the bottom of the page)

This is the second original song that I have ever written.

Actually strike that. I came up with the main melody of this song like one week before I came up with Heaven to Earth. It’s just that the latter vibed stronger with me at the time, so I went with that and completed that song first.

Truth be told, there is a Chinese singer, Wanting, that mainly uses the black keys on the piano when she is playing music. I was trying to be like her and maybe write my own music like that. Turns out, what I had when I finished for the night sounded too much like it’s a Chinese Folk song.

What I did, was coming up with the main melody. Then, I got bored and started to add additional melodies, and ended up with 4. After that, I simply put them all together and the end result was surprisingly good. That is how I came up with the main harmony of the song.

Later, I decided that, maybe I can sing with this song! So I sang, and turns out, flute sounded better. Initially everything of this specific song is digital, i.e. everything is Synthesizer. Even the flute. It sounded good to me, but to other professionals, I needed something better. That’s how I ended up finding YJ.

In the end, this song was six months late than when I just started playing it. After a lot of money spent on mixing and a lot of time spent on just doing the general listening, here you go. KIREI, my second original song. I am super proud of it.

Collab

Album Cover

This is the second album picture that wasn’t 100% by me. The two giant Chinese characters are actually written by my dad, cus he is just a wizard with a pen.

After much inner debate, I picked this. My Dad would pen the title.

I tortured my Dad with picking out the perfect two characters. He wrote a pile of them, and in the end, I picked the one you see right now. Since the Chinese brush and paper are very different from the western style of writing, the brush is usually dipped in a lot of ink. The Chinese Xuanzhi paper is super soft and thin. When water touches super soft and thin paper, you know how it will react to it. The scanned copy of my dad’s writing was so bad I had to actually use the magic marker in Photoshop to get the characters out of its original papers. Like what you see on the right.

After cutting it out and placing it on a scanned Xuanzhi paper I found online, I added in my logo. But the general reception was poor, because it really isn’t a good fit with two giant Chinese characters. Even if I photoshopped it as if it is coming from a stamp, it was still not pleasing to most people. As you’ll see on the right, it stands out quite a bit.

My own custom stamp wouldn’t arrive on time, so I had to actually make my own stamp. Which baffles me because I have never photoshopped anything like that. I also needed to include my logo some how. That’s when it hit me. My logo doesn’t have to always be in that shape. As long as my logo still get to represent what it represents, it should be okay. That’s how, in the end, you get one giant stamp and one small stamp. The small stamp has my Chinese name on it, and the big stamp, just means “love unconditional” (because I couldn’t figure out a way to arrange it normally if I want to fit it in 4 characters).

I’d say, job well done.

Naming

This song is named after a Chinese-Japanese word I learned in my Japanese class. This is originally a Chinese word, which means “beautiful woman”. The Japanese took it with them during the Tang Dynasty, and transferred the meaning to “anything majestically beautiful”. This is the first noun-adjective (copula noun) I learned in my Japanese class, and it striked me so hard that I remembered that very moment all these years. I had no idea what I should name my song, then this came up. I wanted something dashing, something “generous”. Hey, this word fits. That’s why I have not used the Chinese pronunciation of “Qili”, and used “Kirei”, the Japanese pronunciation.

Contributors

Shoutout to all the people who helped me by listening and giving me their ideas (in alphabetical order)

• Alice Deng

• Dymond Lee

• Joy

• Kihyun Jo

• Meiqi Pan: Dongbei Beathoven

• Mike Xu

• Professor Chi Li

• Yujia Li