Through her many character songs, Madoka Yonezawa has garnered notice for her skill as a singer, leaving many fans anxiously awaiting her debut as an artist. Why did she produce a conceptual album as the first step in what is sure to be a memorable major artist career? We chased down her real intentions, together with her profile.
Becoming a voice actress: “I was a nerd”
Interviewer
—Yonezawa-san, this current release, Saezuri no yume, irotoridori no sekai [“A twittering dream, a world of colorful birds”], is your first under your own name, but in 2012 you released a vocal album, White Album 2 Original Soundtrack ~setsuna~, under the name of Setsuna Ogiso, the heroine of White Album 2.
Yonezawa
Yes.
Interviewer
—When you type “Madoka Yonezawa” into Google, the most popular recommended additional search term that comes up is “songs.” In other words, people are looking for your singing voice, and your songs really are quite good.
Yonezawa
Thank you. (laughs)
Interviewer
—So, my first question is, “How did Madoka Yonezawa get so good at singing?” Basically, I want to delve into your musical history. What artists did you like when you were in school?
Yonezawa
I liked artists like GLAY and T.M.Revolution, but I was the type who was satisfied with listening to CDs. I think of “fans” as the kinds of people who go to shows, and maybe start following the band on tour when they get really enthusiastic, but I was never like that.
Interviewer
—Then, what did you enjoy doing at the time?
Yonezawa
I liked drawing pictures. I was one of three sisters, and our father was good at art, so the three of us liked drawing together. I basically started drawing as soon as I was old enough to know how, and I also remember being happy whenever the adults around me praised my drawings. So, back then, I wanted to become an illustrator.
Interviewer
—I know you post illustrations to your blog from time to time, and they’re all quite good as well. But, the Yonezawa-san we know today is not an illustrator, but a voice actress and a vocalist. What led you to pursue the acting path?
Yonezawa
In Osaka, my mother’s hometown, she sometimes wrote songs for theatrical companies, and she was a piano teacher, too. Thanks to that connection, I had plenty of opportunities to go and see plays starting at a young age, and they did make me think, “Oh, drama seems interesting,” but that’s only one reason—the other, bigger reason was that I was a nerd. (laughs) Games, anime… For me personally, video games came first, but I loved them both, and when I was in about my third year of middle school, the thought suddenly flashed into my mind, “Hey, I should be a voice actress!” (laughs) At the time, I was playing a lot of fighting games, so I was thinking about how I’d like to voice a character in a fighting game.
“I wanted to be a ‘singing voice actress’”
Interviewer
—Was it your mother’s influence that set you on the musical path?
Yonezawa
When I was young, I played the piano for a little while, but I really wasn’t a serious student at all. (laughs) I knew that if I learned from my mother, we would inevitably end up fighting, so I went to a different piano teacher, but I didn’t like practicing very much, and I wound up quitting when I was in elementary school… Because of my mother’s work, we had a music room in our house, and apart from the usual instruments, we had congas and bongos, and even that thing that you turn in your hand like shak-shakka-shak-shakka [metal cabasa], so I tried all kinds of other instruments. I checked out the guitar, the drums…
Interviewer
—But, unfortunately, your mother’s blood…
Yonezawa
Apparently didn’t pass into me. (laughs) But I loved singing, and I enjoyed practicing it, too. So singing was really the only thing that I kept on with.
Interviewer
—Oh, were you getting vocal training?
Yonezawa
I wanted to be a singing voice actress, rather than a vocalist—someone who could sing as a voice actress, so from the time I started attending a specialty school for voice acting, I was taking vocal lessons. There were singing lessons available at the school, so I would go to the classroom that that teacher kept privately.
Interviewer
—And why did you want to become a “singing voice actress”?
Yonezawa
I admired actresses like Megumi Hayashibara-san and Yui Horie-san, who also were active as singers. There was also a part of me that wanted to try a little of everything. There are all kinds of categories within voice acting work. There’s narration for TV programs, there’s reading catch phrases for commercials…
Interviewer
—They may all be “acting,” but the approach for dubbing for western movies and overseas dramas must be different from that for anime and games, I imagine.
Yonezawa
That’s right. And apart from that, there are people who create their own theatre troupes and put on plays, or go into music. Personally, I came into this world because I liked video games and anime, but I may have gotten a little greedy. (laughs) If I made the effort to become a voice actress, there were all these other ways to go, so I wanted to try lots of things, not just dramatic acting.
Interviewer
—Were you always the type with a strong desire to express yourself?
Yonezawa
I’m an introverted person, but I wanted to stand out, and I did have a desire to express myself, so I think my personality was a lot to handle. (laughs) I personally don’t have any recollection of this, but when I was really little, my mother was playing the piano at a party for some acquaintance of ours, and apparently I suddenly ran out in front of everyone and started dancing next to her. (laughs) Maybe it was watching my mother all the time that made me want to express myself, too. I thought, “My mother does something she really likes, music, as her job, so she must be really happy with the way she lives.” (laughs) That might be why I started thinking about how much I wanted to find work that would excite me every day.
“I was free to take my own course”
Interviewer
—With a family like yours, did you face any opposition to your becoming a voice actress?
Yonezawa
None whatsoever. They were supportive, but they mostly watched over me from a comfortable distance, without meddling excessively. When I told them that I wanted to go to a specialty school for voice acting, they said, “Oh, really? If you want to do it, you should do it!” and let me go. I’m sure there are plenty of parents who would object to their child aiming to become a voice actor, but my mother gave her support wherever it was needed, and apart from she that believed in letting me take my own course, which I was very grateful for. At the school, there were plenty of girls who were better than I was, and even once I became a voice actress, I didn’t break into the world immediately. The fact that I was able to take activities at my own pace in spite of that was probably thanks to my parents, I think.
Interviewer
—And now, both of your representative works, K-On! and White Album 2, are anime featuring music as a theme.
Yonezawa
That’s true. K-On! involved both an acting audition and a singing evaluation, and for White Album 2, I did an audition in which I read the lines, and then sang. Both roles were decided precisely because I had been carrying on with my musical activities, which made me very happy. Singing the character songs was a lot of fun, too.
Interviewer
—For someone who wanted to become a “singing voice actress,” singing songs as K-On!’s Yui Hirasawa that garnered notice beyond the anime song scene, and making an album under the name of White Album 2’s Setsuna Ogiso, must have been enjoyable.
Yonezawa
Yes. Whatever name they may have been under, the thought that there would be people listening to and enjoying my singing voice naturally increased the power I put into it, and I was happy to think that those songs might end up in CD format. I have a deep love for all of the roles that I play, so I always wish that I could play them forever, but the opportunity to act as those characters only lasts until the broadcast of the program ends, right? But if you have a CD of those character songs, the fans can easily visit that character whenever they like.
Interviewer
—It’s very interesting, talking about that particular trait of media. Fans of shows like K-On! and White Album 2 will have bought the anime on DVD or Blu-ray, and may have watched them any number of times, but listening to the music allows you to come into contact with the work more easily.
Yonezawa
You can listen to music on a train, or during breaks at work, so with character songs, simply having people listen to the music like that makes them remember the character, which is a great feeling.
Interviewer
—Then, having said you wanted to be a “singing voice actress,” was it enough just singing character songs?
Yonezawa
No, while I was singing character songs, I also got approval from the office to get a band together on my own and do concerts. In that way, you could say I managed to strike a balance between the two ways I wanted to express myself—in presenting my own music, and in presenting myself through character songs.
“My major debut! …Now, what do I do with it?”
Interviewer
—That, in and of itself, is very interesting. On one hand, you were doing work that was very overground, with your voice reaching people all over the country through online TV, while on the other hand you were also carrying out your own personal musical activities.
Yonezawa
I guess so. (laughs) Although—this is unrelated to the discussion just now about categories of voice acting, but there are a fair number of voice actors who give their own concerts, so it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything particularly unusual. Also, performing with a band and doing promotions at events were both enjoyable, and it seemed like an important way of declaring my intention to start singing under my own name sooner or later.
Interviewer
—And now we have the album, Saezuri no yume, irotoridori no sekai, released under Madoka Yonezawa’s name. How did you feel when you were approached about doing work as a solo artist?
Yonezawa
It wasn’t as simple as, “Yay! My debut!” It was more like, I quietly thought to myself, “Here goes…!”
Interviewer
—Even though you’d started wanting to sing under your own name?
Yonezawa
At the stage where we were discussing my debut, I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do. First of all, I feel like I was fairly realistic about it: “What am I going to make?” “Let’s make something satisfying.” “Let’s make a quality album.” If it had been like a character song, where they came to me with a fully developed backdrop and character setting to work with and said, “Here, sing this song,” then maybe I would have gone, “Yeah! I’ll sing this! Thank you!” (laughs)
Interviewer
—But now that you were finally going to sing under your own name, just singing something that was already fully arranged for you would have been…
Yonezawa
A waste, yeah. (laughs) So, I calmly asked myself, “All right, what do I do from here?”
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