10 Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 6 (Patreon)

Okay, now we’re back to bands I’m pretty sure nobody other than me even remembers. Advantage Lucy was one of the many bands I blindly stumbled upon when first scrounging YouTube for Japanese music. Formed in the mid-90s as part of the same Shibuya-kei offshoot that produced the previously mentioned Cymbals, Advantage Lucy were a pleasant little indie combo that leaned much more heavily on a gentle, twee acoustic guitar sound than the stylishly kitschy sampling of artists like Pizzicato Five. In particular, just about every write-up I’ve ever seen about the band has to take a moment to highlight how soft and whispery vocalist Aiko is. Honestly, most insufferable indie darlings with weak, breathy voices just get on my nerves, but Aiko manages to pull the act off without it becoming obnoxious. Likewise, Advantage Lucy as a whole have JUUUUST rock in the mix to avoid being too terribly cutsy, with the end result sounding basically like The Cardigans’ long-lost Japanese cousins. Apparently they were one of the more commercially successful late-period Shibuya-kei acts, but as is so often the case, none of that success was connected to any products that made it across the Pacific, so they don’t seem to have developed much of a following in the States outside of super hipster indie circles. And anyway, by the time I stumbled onto them in 2008, they were basically finished as an active band. That really does happen a lot with me.

I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I think “Goodbye” is another case of me imprinting on the very first song I ever heard by an artist, sort of like with “Aa Seishun” by GO!GO!7188. Whether or not I heard it first, I DO know for sure that “Goodbye” always struck me as a song that just HAD to have been some show’s closing theme. This whole series of blogs basically begins with this song, and how flabbergasted I was to discover it genuinely hadn’t been picked up as an ED for anything. I mean, it’s right there in the name! “Goodbye!” What more does it need to do to be a show’s sign-off moment? But even without that title, I still think “Goodbye” would be a great note for a show to wrap up on. It’s gentle enough to have that “cool down” quality, yet also upbeat enough to not feel like a downer. Plus, it’s catchy enough to ensure that the audience keeps thinking about the show for the rest of the day. It’s a win/win! I also seem to recall thinking it reminded me of the kind of song InuYasha would use as a closing theme… which upon reflection makes me wonder what Past Me was smoking, because “Goodbye” doesn’t actually sound like ANY of the InuYasha ED songs to me now. I mean, “Fukai Mori” is a BIT similar in the sense that they both have strumming acoustic guitars as their foundation, but “Fukai Mori” is still a big heart-wrenching Jpop ballad with a string section straight out of a James Bond theme. “Goodbye” is the sort of light, scrappy song you hear playing in the background at a particularly lively a coffee shop. I guess it’s just that those early Adult Swim anime were one of the first times I’d ever really been conscious of the songs that played at the END of a show (that is, as anything other than just an instrumental version of the opening theme that the TV station announcer talked over) and InuYasha was basically inescapable for a while there. But enough about what OTHER shows this song inexplicably reminded me of, what kind of show would I imagine “Goodbye” ACTUALLY being the ending to?

The thing that immediately comes to mind when I listen to “Goodbye” is some kind of Slice of Life show. You know, one of those gentle, happy, cutesy things with a minimum of plot and a maximum of cute anime girls just… doing stuff. Our end credits would just be a montage of pictures of the main cute anime girl doing happy cutesy things around whatever small town the show is set in. Heck, why not have the montage use actual, literal pictures of said random small down, with drawings of the main girl inserted into each shot? I think that’d fit the twee indie groove of “Goodbye” quite nicely. But that doesn’t really describe the show, does it? Even shoes that are ostensibly about nothing still need to actually be about SOMETHING.

Actually, the VERY first thing I thought of while listening to “Goodbye” was a highschool romance romp, but we kind of did that already in the blog for “If,” and that show idea was already pretty loaded down with genre clichés. For this one, I thought of something that’s simultaneously way simpler and a million times weirder: a show about a perfectly average middle schooler going about her perfectly average life, except surrounded by hundreds of weird blobby monster things only she can see. Not like in Mushishi or something, they can’t interact with other things or people, they’re just kinda… there. Floating around and looking derpy and mildly amusing main character girl when she knows nobody else is looking. We don’t know what they are or where they came from or if they even exist outside of main girl’s head, and they don’t affect what little story there is in any way. She just happily goes about her utterly mundane life, preferably rendered in deceptively lush art à la Yotsuba&!, and there’s also these ugly/cute blob things floating around all over everything. There’s not really anything else to it, but I could totally see this kind of nothing idea being juuuuuuuuuuust quirky enough to go over well with people who are too boring to like ACTUAL quirky shows. To be honest, I can absolutely imagine this being one of those shows that my grumpy, robot-loving otaku self would complain about being popular, which is itself a good sign that it'd be a hit. And if nothing else, it seems like the kind of visuals that would go really well with scrappy, low-key indie soundtracks like “Goodbye.”

In fact, let’s revisit what I was saying about the closing credits. A combination of photo backgrounds and drawn characters would be all the more striking if the characters included all these crude, blob creatures floating around in the middle of a real town. What’s more, the combination of minimalist art and “dude walking through town with a camera” level photography would be really easy to pull off in large quantities, so each episode could have a different set of pictures every time. Little details like that are the kind of thing critics always like to point out and pat shows on the back for. Oh, and speaking of changing the ending up, “Goodbye” is also very well suited to being used differently in the final episode. Most episodes could kick in at the beginning and fade out after the first chorus, it’s short enough that you wouldn’t even need to edit anything out. But all good anime know you need to do something different for the last episode, and “Goodbye” gets much more subdued for its second verse before kicking into an instrumental sequence. All the better for having the song kick in early, then have one last scene play out under the credits as they roll. And as the cherry on top, “Goodbye” ends on a lovely little gentle conclusion rather than fading out, and I can totally see the last episode ending on a shot of main character girl and some of her blob friends breaking the forth wall and waving to the viewers on that last line. Hey, it worked for Non Non Biyori.