Album Cut: Hikaru Utada - This is Love | That time Hikaru sat me down and said ‘Gurl.’

I have a list of my favourite Hikaru Utada songs and "This is love" is in it.

I remember the first time I heard "This is love" song and something just clicked beyond the joy of finally having another new Hikaru Utada song to listen to before Ultra blue finally came out. An album that I'd felt like I was waiting for for-fucking-ever.

Part of being a non Japanese speaking J-Pop fan is having to enjoy a song without really knowing the lyrics unless you hit up animelyrics.com. But in many instances, between the song title and the music itself, much of what the song is about is so inferred that you can kinda just...feel it.

Hikaru Utada's "This is love" was one of the first songs where I didn't have to put much into gathering what the song was about. It just struck me the moment I listened to it. I just knew what the song was about. It was weird. It was almost like hearing the song in English.

I was questioning everything in my life, especially love. Different people in my life had vastly different ways of showing what was supposedly 'love' to the point that it changed my view of what it even was. Love became this murky thing to me. It had no clear definition. I didn't know what love was to other people and how they saw it, but I knew what it meant to me, how I wanted it to make me feel and when I wanted to feel it.

Then I heard "This is love" and it was like a punch in the gut and a light-bulb moment all in one. 'FUCK. I think this is it!' The sentiment of the song was almost instant. When Hikaru sings the words 'This is love', it doesn't always feel like a statement or a declaration. At times it feels more like a question. This is love? Or Hikaru having to convince herself that these things that she's feeling must be love, even though she isn't sure. No...this IS love. And by the end of the song she seems sure. This is absolutely love.

I listened to the song so many times that I'd convinced myself that I knew what the song was about without knowing the lyrics of the song. My sixth sense was apparently feeling and deciphering the true meaning of J-Pop songs without having any grasp of the language and I was revelling in it. At some point way down the line I checked out translations of the lyrics, and my bubble remained intact. The song was more or less about what I thought it was. Defining what love is to you and questioning it, but still facing it and accepting it, even if your definition of it goes against what you had previously believed or were told to believe.

"This is love" wasn't just a turning point for me in feeling understood. But it felt like a turning point for Hikaru herself too. The pensive vibe of the song runs throughout Ultra blue and would go on to have a massive impact on Heart station; creating a connected narrative. Ultra blue felt like Hikaru ruminating on love in the midst of it. Whilst Heart station felt like Hikaru looking back on the impact that love had on her. The later of which is understandable, given that songs from the album were recorded after her first divorce.

Speaking of Ultra blue - it's easily the one Hikaru Utada album that I also go back to every now and then, more so than her others. With Distance, Deep river, Heart station, Fantôme and Hatsukoi, I played them all to death when they first came out,then plucked my fave songs from them, and put them into playlists; rarely ever listening to the albums in their entirety again. But with Ultra blue, it's different. "This is love" is the first track on it, so of course, I start there. Then I find myself just letting the album run through. But it took a while for me to get to the point of realisation that this was my favourite Hikaru Utada album. One of the reasons it took so long for me to review Ultra blue was because my opinion of it kept changing, in that I found myself loving it more and more and uncovering layers of it over a period of years. At the time I reviewed Ultra blue, I gave it an 8. But in hindsight, I honestly feel that it really should have been a 10. I have no faults with Ultra blue. A bitch didn't drop the ball once. Hikaru delivered on every damn song. Everything in my review still stands. I mean every word of it and wouldn't take back a thing. But rating wise, I definitely feel the album is a 10. And it's an album I'll hold dear for it featuring the song that defined a moment in my life where I finally felt like I had clarity after long periods of uncertainty.