Legend of the Galactic Heroes‘s ability to pull off cheesy English openings gloriously is unrivalled. Well…the first three openings anyway. OP4 “Must be Something” is generally considered the saddest opening in the show, and landed 68th place in K at the Movies’ “100 Worst Anime Openings” based on scores given by aniblogger friends including myself.
What makes the song so bad? Well…the pronunciation and grammar are kind of ick, the breathing is unpleasant, and the pitch and harmony are questionable at best. I mean, just listen to it:
If only they had let the lady from OP1 do this song. But Moya, aren’t you being harsh? Singing is hard and English is one of the most difficult languages to learn! Taking this into account, I decided to try doing the reverse – translate “Must be Something” into a Japanese song with cheesy lyrics and cover it, echo/reverb and all:
| Kanji | English | |
| 時には苦しくなる 君のいない世界は遠く 君なら知ってるかな なぜか風の中に生まれた 君のことを思う度々 君は生きてる It must be something 心に流れて There must be something この時を越えて It seems so far away 今日から始まり Tonight for you I pray 一番眩しい星のように | Sometimes it gets so hard without you It seems to me the whole world’s away Do you know, you have a clue Why I was born to live this windy day? I think of you, oh, you holding me tight Now feel your warmth revive It must be something That comes, flooding into my heart There must be something That leads me through the space between It seems so far away We’ve come but it’s only a start Tonight for you I pray To the brightest star on the heavenly screen |
This sort of thing tends to be embarrassing, but it helped to remember that grammatically questionable lyrics and horrendous sound editing is in fact in the spirit of this project. I had fun recording on my phone in the bathroom while nobody was home! I feel like this could genuinely have been decent if I had a clean background track to use and actually knew how to do sound editing, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself in my excitement at having discovered Audacity.
Did I do better than Ms. Hitomi Konno at “Must be Something”? It’s okay to tell the truth!
The Moyatorium 
Well, that’s one way to have your singing debut. You sound pretty good :).
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Debut? She may have sung a song or two before 😉
This was a good one though, for sure!
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Thanks, it was fun. 🙂
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The reverse translation to JP lyrics is really cool!
I like the way you translated it in the first 4 lines especially, it flows very nicely~
(Also, Audacity is wonderful once you get familiar with using it to mix and use plugins with it.)
If I had to rate, I’d give 4/5 stars for the singing alone 👍👍👍👍
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Oh, that’s kind of you! Now I know I have someone to ask if I want to play with Audacity again. 😁
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