The Temperature of the Songs I Love
When someone asks what music I like, I usually name artists. But the more I think about it, what I love isn't a particular artist — it's a certain “temperature.” A summer dawn at 4 a.m.; the crisp seaside just after the rain.
The Temperature of the Songs I Love
A summer dawn at 4 a.m. The crisp seaside just after the rain.
When someone asks what music I like, I usually name artists. Hanroro, HONNE, wave to earth. But the more I think about it, what I love isn't a particular artist — it's a certain “temperature.” Any song that carries that temperature ends up in my playlist, no matter who's singing it.
It took me a long while to sum up that temperature in a single sentence.
Picturing the scene
Around 4 a.m. on a summer night. The window is open, and the sun hasn't risen yet. The air is slightly cold. The room is dark and quiet, and a single strand of wind drifts in from outside, stirring the curtains slowly.
One more scene is needed to complete it. “The seaside,” or “a street right after the rain has stopped.”
At the seaside at dawn, the horizon brightens faintly and the sound of waves carries steadily from far away. On a street after the rain, the air has been washed clean and clear, and the streetlights shimmer over the wet asphalt.
What the two scenes have in common is — “the freshness right after something has passed through.” The sand after the waves recede, the street after the rain has poured down. The calm left behind once the intensity is over. That's why a sense of relief lies underneath it. The feeling that “it has passed.”
The texture of the sound
Songs that carry this temperature share a similar sound, too.
The vocals sit a little apart, as if heard from a distance. Instead of pouring out emotion, the singer steps back and sings with a calm restraint. That very restraint is what reaches the heart all the more.
The instruments are spaced out rather than packed tightly. Air passes through the gaps between them. The reverb runs long, so the space feels wide — a sense of distance, as if the song were being sung not in a cramped room but out in the open.
It doesn't explode at the climax. If anything, it empties out even further.
Coolness — that's the heart of it
If I had to choose one word that runs through all of this — “coolness,” or “freshness.”
Not stifling, not heavy, not humid. It doesn't wring emotion out in a sticky way. Rather than pleading up close like a ballad, it drifts past from far away like a breeze.
So it isn't gloomy. Wistful but not gloomy, calm but not stifling, bright but not relentlessly bright. A temperature somewhere in between.
In the end, the sensation these songs create is — a premonition that “things are going to be okay.” Even if I'm not happy right this moment, it feels like I soon will be. Like the air after the rain has stopped, like the sand after the waves have receded.
Songs of this temperature
Hanroro's “You'll Come to Love” is exactly this temperature. The melody is relatively bright and light, but the lyrics aren't simply light. The same goes for HONNE's songs — a warm message laid over a melancholic sound.
Follow this texture and you reach wave to earth, and over on the Japanese side there's Lamp, mei ehara, Vaundy, and Ryokuoushoku Shakai (緑黄色社会). In Korea, Adoy and Baek Yerin create a similar air.
Ryokuoushoku Shakai in particular comes close to the very essence of this temperature. Haruko Nagaya's (長屋晴子) clear yet slightly husky vocals; arrangements that, even as full band sound, never feel stifling but stretch out cool and open. Songs like “Mela!” and “It's Love” deliver exactly that premonition of something “calm yet cool, and about to be okay.”
If you break it down by genre, it's ultimately the DNA of “city pop.” Arrangements with room to breathe, dry and crisp vocals, a melancholic yet refreshing mood. That sensibility, born from the nightscapes of 1980s Tokyo, has flowed all the way to the air of a seaside at dawn.
And so
I don't like sad songs.
I tend to like upbeat ones.
But a wistful freshness — that I prize above all.
I love songs that feel like “crisp air washed clean by rain.” The stillness left where something has passed through, the faint light soaking into it, and the premonition that something is about to begin.
When there's a song of that temperature around, my breath turns wonderfully cool.