“Beneath the Waves” was written, essentially, as a sequel to our first song “Minato”, which we produced while we were still part of the Fandori Project. The main question that I set out to answer in the lyrics to “Beneath the Waves” was – what do you do when you’ve lost sight of the goal you once set out to pursue, and with it, your motivation?

Unfortunately, though, a lot of the common imagery relating to this theme – especially light and fire – has been quite overdone so I naturally attempted to avert it. As an avid swimmer at the time, and at some point a bit of a drinker, my choice was obvious. Water quenches fire, but at the same time, water also nourishes.

Risk is very much inevitable when one takes one’s first step into an unknown, even when one feels like there is no choice but to take that step (even if it’s a lesser evil rather than an inevitable necessity). It is easy to romanticise the pursuit of your dreams, but the reality is that fulfilling them is rarely straightforward, and it’s very difficult to say – as much as one does wish otherwise – that one can truly ever have a brand new start from zero.

The crux of this song is – in spite of all that, the narrator will still take the plunge beneath the waves, just like a baptism. They will take ownership of their destiny, and look beyond the horizon, towards the shore.

When I wrote these lyrics, I had also recently been exposed to two remarkably similar narratives of a couple of characters in Bushiroad’s multimedia franchises – Hikari Kagura from Revue Starlight and Rui Yashio from BanG Dream!. Briefly, both are immensely talented individuals, attempting to rekindle their previous brilliance after a significant defeat (at least, in their perspective) got in their way. The latter, in particular, stopped playing the violin on account of being unable to maintain her winning streak in music competitions, and thereafter perceived music as a fool’s endeavour.

Much of this song was written in the midst of a long-drawn pandemic that, as of the time of writing, is still very much taking place. My wish is that it would at least have given our listeners some hope in these troubling times.