Coverage of Utada’s “WILD LIFE”
When I said I had a feeling that Utada Hikaru‘s WILD LIFE tour was going to be fantastic, I wasn’t wrong ♥
Me and a few friends on Twitter, (namely our talented group of media critics Selryam, Donovon, FUTURESTARdelux and cucupan), woke up early/stayed up late to watch the irreplaceable goddess of Japanese music live for her farewell concert, and I was completely unprepared to how amazing the setlist of the concert was going to be as well as how much nostalgia it would be evoking! It was certainly one of Utada’s most amazing, heartfelt performances, ever!
The show opened with an intro video starring Kuma-chang in a Kuma-shaped spaceship that crashes onto Earth. Utada then comes down from a metal structure located on the ceiling and opens the show with Goodbye Happiness, which medleys into traveling towards the end of the song. She’s surrounded by
a small orchestra at the center of the stage, and this part of the concert is very upbeat, with some songs she never sang live before! The setlist for this part of the concert is as follows:
Opening
Goodbye Hapiness
traveling
テイク 5
Prisoner Of Love
COLORS
Letters
Hymne a l’amour ～愛のアンセム～
SAKURAドロップス
Eclipse (Interlude)
This part of the concert brought about a lot of nostalgia, with songs like traveling, Letters and COLORS, as well as Prisoner Of Love and yet, had an air of freshness with テイク 5, a fan favorite that was never sang live before! Utada kept the magical feel of this part of the show with her phantasmagorical outfit reminiscent of UTADA UNITED 2006‘s cotton candy outfit:
After Utada’s piano rendition of SAKURAドロップス, she’s brought down through the platform at the center of the stage for an outfit change, and comes back with a slightly more casual outfit for the bigger part of the tour:
This was my absolute favorite part because for the first time ever, she sang my favorite song on the ULTRA BLUE album (and also one of my top favorite Utada Hikaru songs of all time), BLUE! This sequence of songs was beyond epic:
Passion
BLUE
Show Me Love (Not A Dream)
Stay Gold
ぼくはくま
Automatic
First Love
Flavor Of Life
Beautiful World
光
虹色バス
This has some of my favorite Hikki songs, and I love it how she didn’t stick solely to classics, and picked more of her more meaningful songs as well as fan favorites to compose the setlist! I was kind of getting tired of Can You Keep A Secret? and Wait & See ～リスク～ on every tour of hers, so I think this tour was fantastic when it came to song choice. Hikki’s voice, however, was pretty strained sometimes, and I think she should’ve warmed up a little bit before she went on stage. Some songs were kind of hard to listen to.
The arrangements were amazing, though! Stay Gold took my breath away and Hikki just went for it with Beautiful World! At the end she played around with her vocals a lot, just throwing herself out there in a very cute, exciting manner that got me even more excited about the performance! This was truly something special! On 虹色バス, Hikki even got emotional with the applause of her fans, and I could see her eyes sparking in a way that looked teary, and it was just a beautiful moment, where she was asking for more and more applause (possibly for the encore), and got so sentimental! She looked beautiful!
She went out for a brief outfit change after this set and came back with a guitar and very casual clothing:
Here Hikki surprised us with a homage to John Lennon with the song Across The Universe while she played guitar. Unfortunately, this was the only English song she played, but the encore was fantastic because it brought about such a personal feeling! The setlist was as follows:
Across the Universe
Can’t Wait ‘Til Christmas
time will tell
I loved it to death! The ending with time will tell was so beautiful! I love this song and I’m sure it holds a lot of meaning to Hikki because it was on her debut single and is just one of the songs that’s kept as a classic but not in an overrated, overplayed manner, so it was such a pleasant surprise!
The setlist for WILD LIFE was nothing wild, rather very heartfelt, beautiful, unique, and nothing like I expected! When she started to sing BLUE, my heart melted like nothing else! I can’t wait to have this on DVD, because it was truly something beyond my imagination and so special! It wasn’t as full of special effects as UTADA UNITED 2006, but it was definitely of huge production! Musically fantastic and full of feeling, it’s just the type of farewell tour I’d expect from Hikki! As personal as a mega production can get!
To everyone who purchased a copy of Utada Hikaru SINGLE COLLECTION VOL.2, you’ll be able to watch the concert again as many times as you want in the following website sometime soon!
Everything was worth it! Even rookie J-Pop sensation JASMINE was watching and enjoying the concert from her house, tweeting about it!
We’re all going to miss you so much, Hikki! ♡ Enjoy your hiatus and please don’t forget about us! We’ll be patiently waiting for you!
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