Luna's Blog of Musical Things

[Satori]

Entry Number 1
Entry Title: Welcome Back!

Hello again, loyal fans.  Well, after my old blog was lost to the depths of the Network, I finally got around to re-creating it.  Sadly, all of the archives were lost, so I can't bring them back for anyone who wanted to read through all of them.  Sorry!  I will be rewriting the album commentary posts though, since I get new fans every day and I know some of them want to hear my thoughts on my work.  Those will be coming as soon as I can get them up, and then I'll be trying to get back into a weekly update schedule.  Wish me luck!

-Luna

[Satori]

Entry Number 2
Entry Title: "Chasing the Starry Sky"

Chasing the Starry Sky I think it really shows was my first album.  I've been singing for a few years but this was my first time on the professional scene, and I was kind of pushed up here without much chance to adjust.  And it shows here, both in how haphazard some of the songs were recorded and in the childlike singing.  I've heard from a lot of my fans who loved that and couldn't quite adjust when I had a more mature voice on Halo, but I'm sorry to say I never meant to do it like this.  Live and learn, I think.

The cover art comes from an old painting.  Nobody I know could find the original title of it, but now that it's showed up as the album cover it's gotten to be known as, well, Chasing the Starry Sky.  For anyone who's somehow never seen it (which means you either have never heard my music or downloaded it illegally.  Shame on you!) it features the night sky, with a young girl at the foot of a bridge of light leading up to the stars.  My manager saw it, and wouldn't accept anything else.  But of course, I like it too!

Song by song breakdown:

1. Savior from the Sky: Every child dreams of going to space at some point.  Well, this song's about a girl whose dreams come true when a man from the stars carries her away on an adventure.  The video stars me in the girl's place and shows some of our adventures.  It's a tale of action, inspiration, and love, fitting for most everyone's first introduction to me.  Of course, none of this actually happened to me, but we can all still dream.
2. Nightlight: The universal solution to our fear of the dark.  It's about overcoming our fears, one step at a time.
3. Among the Stars: There used to be a saying that went something like "Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."  It rings a bit hollow these days, but it still makes for a good inspirational tale.  This one's got a video too, but I don't recommend it.  It was the first music video I ever did and it shows.  So embarassing!
4. Alice: I was a bad girl with this one.  I didn't write many of my own lyrics back then, but I would occasionally change lines if I thought something else worked better.  With this one I changed a lot of lines.  It's supposed to be based on a dream, but if you listen really closely it sounds more like a nightmare.  It gets less coherent as it goes on, then just...ends.  I'll leave it up to you, dear fans, what happened.
5. Bright Eyes: Have you ever met someone who could set your mind at ease with a cheerful smile?  I have, and it inspired this song.  I focused a bit more on the eyes though.
6. Your Song: It's a dedication, in music.  I didn't mean it to anyone in particular, so let's just say it's to you.  Yes, you, reading this right now.  This is your song, in thanks for all your support.  It was a bit presumptuous at the time though, wasn't it?
This ended up as the album's third single, but never got a video.
7. Machine Boy: This one's easily my favorite from the album.  Back before my manager took me on I mostly covered other songs, so I had no experience writing my own music.  But I wanted to try anyway, so I wrote a love song where the object of the girl's affection turned out to be an android.  I probably did a terrible job on it, but I'm proud of it anyway.
8. Anthem: At the time I didn't know if anyone would dare use a silly dance pop song as a theme song or anthem, but I tried anyway, and this is what we came up with.  It's an inspirational tune meant for pretty much anybody.  Feel free to adopt it as your own!
9. Dreaming: My old songs were a bit same-y, weren't they?  This one's not actually about dreams, but following them.  Because anything can happen while you're asleep, but once you wake up only you can make that into reality.

-Luna

[Satori]

Entry Number 3
Entry Title: "Halo"

Halo, I think is where I really hit it big.  Chasing the Starry Sky was popular, but looking back it was like Baby's First Pop Record.  Halo was much more professional, and I finally had a permanent sound team, *I* sounded better on it...and it sold five times as many copies. *laughs*  It also has a wider variety of songs, for anyone who criticized Starry Sky for having eight of the same song and also Machine Boy.  Most importantly for me, this is the first album featuring Jenny Quinn on keyboard, a fact that would have made it worlds better than Chasing the Starry Sky even if I sounded exactly the same.

The album art comes from another old painting, titled "Sleeping Sun" and depicting an eclipse.

1. Angel: Funny story, but this was originally a song of almost ten minutes, featuring a couple of extended instrumental sections where Jenny showed off her keyboard skills and I showed off my dancing.  In live performances, at least.  It's got a bit more of a rock style than I'm used too, but I wanted to branch out just a little after the last album and this is what happened.  But we couldn't decide whether to open or end the album with it, so we split it into "Angel" and "Halo", and did both.
2. Until Now: It's a song about noticing someone for the first time.  I like to imagine that the boy on the other end was in that horrible situation we've all been in where you fancy someone who doesn't know you exist.  But then suddenly she does, and they all lived happily ever after.
3. Fairyland: Speaking of happily ever after, here's a song about children's stories, and the kind of world where they must all take place.  It's a magical world where the power of love can conquer everything and "happily ever after" is a realistic goal.  Sounds a little too good to be true sometimes, but maybe someday.
4. Beautiful Broken Heart: The only single for this album that didn't involve splitting one song into two.  It's a slower piece about a heartbroken girl and the boy who tries to lead her back to happiness.
5. Shy: Another slow piece, and one of the only songs I haven't performed, because I can't dance alone to it.  It's really meant for dancing with a loved one, not alone on stage.  Maybe one of you can be my partner someday!
6. I Promise: Looking back, clustering all the slow songs of the album right in the middle may not have been the best idea.  My manager didn't want to include this one at all, but I insisted.  This one's easily my favorite from the album, for many of the same reasons as Machine Boy on the last.  I had much more of a say on it than anything else on here, and the mood takes a sharp turn from anything else on the album.  It's easily the saddest song I've ever performed, even including a few upcoming tracks on Warning.  It's about a girl who dies before her lover, and promises on her deathbed to meet him in the next life.
7. The Hero: As if one song about death wasn't enough.  Rather than the sad parting of I Promise though, this one's about a war hero and his noble sacrifice, and as such it starts triumphant, and just gets more bombastic as it goes on.  Just what we all needed after the last three tracks.
8. Stairway to the Stars: In what would become a trend that would come up far more than I ever anticipated, Stairway to the Stars is a call-back to Chasing the Starry Sky, inspired by, of all things, the album art and the painting it draws from.  I tried to emulate my old style as much as I could, but with how much my voice had matured even in only a year, and how much more confident I'd become, I couldn't quite manage it.
9. Doll in Black: They say a little black dress goes with anything.  And I've heard my sound team claiming Doll in Black goes with any set.  In fact, I think I've sung it in every performance since Halo came out because of that.  It's frightfully generic.  But I enjoy singing it anyway.
10. Into Fantasia: Welcome to a world where heroes are born every day, they always get the girl, the bad guy is always defeated in the end, where magic is not just real, but commonplace, and people witness legends every day.  It sounds like it's just a rehash of Fairyland, and maybe it is.  But Fairyland was always intended to be about a made up world, while Into Fantasia could easily be our world, from the right point of view.
11. Ever More: We really ended up pushing happily ever after as a recurring theme here, didn't we?  Ever More is about a boy's (yes, it is a boy.  Not news anymore, but when I first posted about this album it took a few people by surprise) desire to live happily ever after with his girlfriend.  But what does the girl think?  It took me until the next album to answer that.  Stay tuned!
12. Halo: Since I already talked about both Angel and Halo, how about I tell a little secret about the video?  I've heard a bit of criticism (mostly from people who didn't realize they were the same song in two parts) that the videos, featuring me performing in a fictional nightclub fittingly called Angel Halo, were the same thing shot twice.  But like the song, it's actually one video in two parts.  No really, play them one after the other, Halo picks up exactly where Angel left off.

-Luna

[Satori]

Entry Number 4
Entry Title: "As If We Were Dying"

[Sorry for taking so long with this one.  Busy days lately.  I've been recording the last few songs for Warning and doing promo material for it.  I can't guarantee everything going back to normal yet since I'm still not done, but I did manage to find time to write this, so I'm gradually catching up.]

We've all had that feeling before.  We never know if we're about to die tomorrow, so we should be doing all the living we can in the time we have left.  That's As If We Were Dying.  I'm not quite sure I did it justice though...maybe I'll revisit it in the future.  Stylistically this one's pretty much the same as Halo.  It was a comfortable style, with enough variety to let me mess around just a little bit.  Plus, I had all the same staff as Halo, so it was easiest on all of us!  Topically though, it's a bit darker than Halo.  This was about where I started on my downward spiral into darker themes, if you want to call it that.  A few people noticed, but any buzz over it was drowned out by Lunatic's first performance only a month later.  Oh well.  It ended up not getting as much attention as Halo, and definitely not as much as Bittersweet after it.  For obvious reasons, really.  I'll admit to forgetting about it occasionally too.

The album art here is a digital mashup of scenes of people...well, living, arranged into a mosaic of a man skydiving.  The artist is actually an AI named LANA, who compiled pieces like these in hopes of getting a sense of how humans could live.  ...Now that I think about it, she was decommissioned a couple years ago because it had completely overtaken her ability to function as programmed.  Never let it be said AI don't have a hard life.


1. As If We Were Dying - The song's about what you can guess from the title: a young woman witnesses her father die at only 45 and, worried that she too could die young, she and her boyfriend start living every day like they're dying.  It starts pretty simple, then just runs wild as the song goes on.  The composer had...quite an imagination.  The video just puts pictures to it.  I'm just disappointed I didn't actually get to do much other than sing on it.
2. Imitation - Stylistically, this one's the odd one for this album.  I was reading over the lyrics the first time through, and thought 'hey, if I'm singing a song about artificial intelligence called 'Imitation', wouldn't it be interesting if I sang it over an imitation of my usual background tracks with different instruments?'  I then spent the next three days trying to talk my manager into it, and eventually got through to him.  So here it is!
3. Quiet - A loud song about wanting a quiet life.  No, really.  Jenny said she nearly drowned in the irony while recording it.
4. Superstar - This...agh.  Looking back, I really don't like this song.  If I could, I would go back and change absolutely everything about it.  The lyrics are mostly fine, but my vocal track is rushed and sounds like I was sick (I may very well have been at the time) the instrumental tracks don't work, and I just plain don't like how it sounds.  Add on top of that the fact that, despite being a perfectly generic song about...well, superstardom, it got a single release as well.  Fortunately that went entirely unnoticed because of Lunatic.
5. My Mind's Eye - I've gotten a few theories about this one.  They go everywhere from someone trying to intellectually justify lusting after someone to hiding behind a created persona in day to day life.  And...none of those are true.  It's actually about a stalker trying to control his urges every time he sees the object of his attraction.  I think I had this one on the mind with a few songs from later albums.
6. Melancholy - I think the running theme for this album is sheer dissonance between the tone of the songs and their lyrical content.  Your Final Breath is the worst offender by far, but really?  To oversimplify things, it's a song about attempting to overcome depression, and it speaks a lot  more for my composer as he was at the time than for me.  I don't know if writing an instrumental track that wouldn't be out of place with Savior From the Sky's lyrics actually helped, but that's what he did.
7. Dragon Rider - I heard a story a few weeks after this album was released about a couple of Pilots making a propaganda video with this as the background.  Great!  I must be doing something right, and I can't say I mind the attention it got.
8. Boys and Girls - It's a song about boys.  And girls.  Sex is involved.  And yes, it's a true story *wink*.
9. Learning to Live - It's not a part of the same story as Machine Boy, but it's also about an android, and his 'exploits' in trying to live a normal life.  I'd say it doesn't go well, but there is a happy ending and nobody dies so I guess it does.
10. Sunrise - Most of my fans down on the lower levels have probably never seen the sunrise.  And some of you probably didn't even know that there was such a thing as the sun!  I'm so sorry!  But this is my gift to you.  I can't show it to you, as I'd like to, but I can at least put the experience into song!
11. Never More - So.  Ever More.  A boy in love's desire for happily ever after.  It's a touching love story, right?  Nope!  This one's from his girlfriend's perspective, a girl who feels like their relationship has gotten distant and strained and just wants for it all to end.  And of course the boy doesn't know that, which just frustrates her even more.  And suddenly that story becomes a lot less cheerful.
12. Your Final Breath - This one's my favorite from the album.  It's a follow-up to I Promise, and it's the happiest funeral song you've ever heard.  No really, it's dance pop like everything else and there's a funeral in the video where a ghost plays a guitar solo.  The song is pretty self-explanatory.  The boy left behind in I Promise is mourning the girl who died and wondering if he could have done anything to save her.  And ironically it's I Promise that has the much somber tone, despite the lyrics being a bit more hopeful.

-Luna