Fujii Kaze performs “Michi Teyu Ku (Overflowing)” at the Music Awards Japan

A screenshot of Fujii Kaze performing at the Music Japan Awards — sat at a piano, with a framed black and white photo of himself

Album of the Year winner Fujii Kaze performed at the Music Japan Awards, where he graced audiences with a stripped down rendition of “Michi Teyu Ku (Overflowing)”.

The first time I heard “Michi Teyu Ku (Overflowing)” my initial thought was ‘This shoulda been a piano ballad’. So I’m very much in favour of Fujii making the choice to perform “Michi Teyu Ku (Overflowing)” as the version it should have been in the first place. I took this personally.

One of the cool things about Fujii is that he frequently performs his songs with just a piano. So if you are a fan of his songs sounding stripped down, inevitably you’re going to hear them in that form at some point. I really would like him to release a self covers album one day in the form of his cover albums — just him and a piano singing his own songs.

The staging for this performance was also really cool, tying in the narrative of the videos for both “Michi Teyu Ku (Overflowing)” and “Hana”, but also feeling like an intentional visual representation of the song itself — a performance which stripped away spectacle and distractions, and felt fully realised and fulfilling as a result.

This performance made me like “Michi Teyu Ku (Overflowing)” a whole lot more.