Master craftsman Haruomi Hosono has a message from the heart

He was still a sociology undergrad at Rikkyo University when his early band Happy End’s masterful second album Kazemachi Roman seismically shifted nationwide attitudes towards the viability and seriousness of Japanese-language rock music – but that was only the very beginning of a lifelong voyage into the unknown for Haruomi Hosono. His luminary work with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, alongside co-founders Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, was crucial in propelling electronic music from a chin-stroker’s outsider interest to a worldwide phenomenon, while 53 years on from his solo debut Hosono House, the fire of his boundary-pushing solo career continues to burn.

His genre-fluid work has touched multiple generations, from all walks of life, across the whole world. But, as the sun rises on a fresh project, what kind of artist is Haruomi Hosono now? 

In the past – of course – he has been a starry-eyed folk singer, a city-pop soundscaper, and a technological experimentalist whose synth work was a vital building block for early hip-hop. Too, he has been a worldwide pop star, a skilful ambient technician, and – as “hero” of Mac DeMarco and “obsession” of Harry Styles – a cosmic slacker providing a whole generation with a lo-fi indie pop template. 

But Yours Sincerely – his first solo work since 2019 record Hochono House – captures a portrait of the artist in a manner we have seldom seen in a storied career. At 79 years old, Hosono has explored so many sounds, but very rarely has his music been so stripped-back, pensive, or sentimental as it is on his new album. Crafting with the tools he has spent a lifetime perfecting, he finds here that sometimes the simplest expressions are the most powerful.

“I approached the writing very differently to my past works,” Hosono tells me, dialling in from his Tokyo studio. His voice has a gravitas, a real worldly rumble. “It’s not really a record written for the whole world. It was intended to be delivered to the people closest to me, sort of like a letter.” Yours Sincerely captures this closeness effortlessly, its skeletal arrangements give timeless melodies space to soar – when Hosono sings and hums, it sounds as though he is sitting right beside you. 

Hosono is smoking and sitting comfortably in his studio in suburban Tokyo on the periphery of the metropolitan sprawl, and speaking through an interpreter, we we talk. In sight is a cluster of merchandise – work by collaborators Miharu Koshi (who appears on a number of the songs on Yours Sincerely) and Cornelius, a pack of jumbo Elvis stickers, and piles upon piles of books. “My working office is upstairs,” he tells me. “And I was born here, in this very building.” It is a homely, orderly environment, which goes some way to explaining the sentimental nature of Yours Sincerely.

Echoes of the past and the half-remembered melodies of others chime through on a collection of intimate songs inspired by his recent life in the Japanese capital. Almost-title track “Sincerely” – released last month as a single – perhaps captures this mood the best. It is a cover of a song by Cleveland doo-wop group The Moonglows that Hosono has part-translated into Japanese, and arranged for a silky Bossa guitar, chiming bells, and his own weighty baritone voice. 

He couldn’t leave “Sincerely” ‘uncovered’, he said upon its single release, as the word itself – “Sincerely, meaning, “from the heart”” – is the vital unifying concept behind the album. 

“I must have been in junior high when I first heard that song,” he laughs warmly. “It was the 1950s, I’d have been listening to it through a little radio. I think it would have probably been The McGuire Sisters’ version, although, when listening to every version I could find for my cover, I liked the Paris Sisters’ version the best. I tried all kinds of arrangements myself, but in the end I preferred the simplest arrangements.”

This cover is not the only time that Hosono repurposes older songs, ideas, and melodies to match his current expression. “Humming ‘Dream of Love’” sees him humming the melody to Liszt’s Liebesträume No.3 over a delightfully warm guitar-and-music box arrangement, whilst “Figlia Perdita” sees part of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony transformed into a wonderfully knotty avant-folk number. The borrowed melodies blend so seamlessly with the rest of the album – without prior knowledge, you’d never guess that their tunes are centuries old. “Even when I hear classical music,” Hosono smiles: “my ears are tuned to a pop frequency. The pieces I really love are always the pieces that sound pop to my ears. That certainly is the case for the pieces selected here.” 

The classical melodies on Yours Sincerely are beautifully deployed, but repurposed here purely on their own musical merits. There is no knowing nod or wink, and it’s clear that although Hosono loves this music, he sees pop music as classical’s equal as a source of inspiration. “I’d never heard the Beethoven piece before,” he later continued. “But I heard it used in a movie – an end-of-the-world panic movie which starred Nicolas Cage. ‘Knowing’. That song is the backing music as humanity is about to be destroyed. It had a very strong impact on me, and I knew I had to use it.”

For so much of his career, Hosono’s tastes have been characteristically outward-facing – “exotica” records were an early influence on his pre-YMO records, and the music of India, Brazil, and early cyberspace have been huge inspirations for him at different points in his career. But as he returns to the studio, endeavouring to create something “straight from the heart”, Hosono’s tastes have turned inwards somewhat. 

With the sentimentality, the vulnerability, comes a deep nostalgia for past musical loves. What shines through the brightest for him is the music of his youth: 1940s and ‘50s American sounds, as he’d hear all those years ago, under the duvet on Sony portable radio as a boy in post-war Tokyo.

By Hosono’s own admission, he no longer feels excited by new music. His love of exploring new sounds as part of his own process has never waned, but the new music technology available to him doesn’t inspire him. “Around the time of Yellow Magic Orchestra, all technology seemed really fun,” Hosono says. “It was like a toy. We were playing. But now – AI especially – I get the impression new technology is for people who don’t enjoy making music. I find it interesting, of course, but I’m watching it develop with a sense of anxiety.” 

“But isn’t everybody?” he cackles, taking another drag of his cigarette. 

Throughout the Yours Sincerely sessions, there is a sense that Hosono instead wants to view himself as a master craftsman, trying to conjure magic with relatively simple tools. His guitar playing isn’t overly flashy, but his melodic ear is deadly sharp – there are ornamental flourishes all over the album that give it a delicate, discreet beauty. 

“In Japan, we have the phrase “urushinuri shokunin”,” he gleams. “It means lacquerer, or maybe artisan. A craftsman that keeps working on something, polishing until it gets to a certain quality. I look at myself and my old equipment a bit like that. Always polishing and polishing.” 

“What inspires me most at the moment,” he tells me, “is musicians from my own generation that are still making music. I recently saw David Byrne – he came right here, actually – and his show was so big. I thought, “I could never do this!” so it was a big inspiration to me.” Bob Dylan, too, continues to overjoy and influence Hosono – “I was just watching some of his live footage. I felt very happy to see that.”

Beyond his favourite Beethoven and Liszt pieces, Hosono didn’t listen to much music at all during the making of Yours Sincerely. It’s been a strange period of his life. He is, though, very much getting into the swing of things in a post-pandemic world. From the very starting gun – the self-titled debut album by his first proper band Apryl Fool in 1969 – Hosono had always been frightfully busy. An eye-watering 2,200 Discogs credits as an artist, producer, and session musician only really scratches the surface, but this obscenely prolific hot streak became ice cool in 2020. 

“I drew a complete creative blank during the pandemic,” he tells me, recalling the time between Hochono House, and Yours Sincerely. “During those times, I wasn’t really in touch with music at all. I’d spend my days driving around Tokyo in my car, patrolling, and asking myself: “What has happened to the world?” It was such a hollow scene. I didn’t have the brain capacity, or the mindset, to even think about music during this period – for maybe three years.” 

“But now, in a sense, the world has gone back to normal,” Hosono tells me: “my mind has just clicked back into its usual, creative mindset.” Yours Sincerely was largely written and recorded in a concentrated creative burst. Most of the songs came to him between March and May this year, hinting at a return to the prolific Hosono of the past, although pensive closer ‘Anemo Wheel’ is the outlier in this regard. 

“‘Anemo Wheel’ is the exception. Everything else came without thinking too heavily,” he says. “But that piece dates from 1984. I made it for a TV show, but it didn’t end up being used because the show finished early. I even forgot it existed. But when I rediscovered it on an unlabelled cassette and listened to it, I really felt like I had to use it.” 

Despite this, “Anemo Wheel” sounds like a thoroughly modern artefact – driving home the prescience of Hosono’s ‘80s futurism. It would be right at home as a freshly composed podcast soundbed, or incidental music on the latest Roblox game, but instead sits very comfortably on Yours Sincerely. It shares a tenderness and closeness with the rest of the album. Naturalistic and emotional, breathing and wilting, there is a vulnerability in its circuitry. 

"Anemo Wheel" doesn’t simply serve as a reminder of just how many different artists Haruomi Hosono has been throughout his career, but implies that they have all been engaging in a rich creative conversation that spans generations. Yours Sincerely is the master craftsman’s first correspondence in quite some time – it finds him in good spirits, well, and reminiscing whilst living firmly in the present.