This week, Jonah Yano announced his debut album ‘souvenir’ and shared its first single ‘shoes’ featuring his father Tatsuya Muraoka. ‘souvenir’, out June 19th via Innovative Leisure, is the follow up to his critically lauded 2019 debut EP ‘nervous.’ With collaborations from talents like producers Monsune, Leland Whitty & Alexander Sowinski of BADBADNOTGOOD, and Jacques Greene, the 11-song collection touches on themes of family separation, healing, and reconciling with the past.
The album’s debut single “shoes” reflects an emotional reunion between Jonah his father Tatsuya Muraoka. Having not seen each other in 15 years (following the separation of his parents in 1998 in Hiroshima and subsequent move to Vancouver, Yano spent years with very little connection to his father beyond occasional calls and birthday presents), Yano visited his father in Nagato in the fall of 2019 with the goal of making sense of their complicated relationship. Most of the track was recorded live at some point in the 1990’s in Hiroshima, with Yano’s own vocals filling gaps between his father’s vocals.
“The song in my dad’s Japanese lyrics are about a pair of shoes he bought me when I was a kid,” Yano explains. “My verses question his absence from my childhood and my general confusion about my circumstance, which was a fatherless upbringing in an entirely different country as a result of my parents’ separation.”
Recording the album in Tokyo’s Red Bull studios, a log cabin in Nagato, Toronto’s Studio 69, and his own home, the intensely personal album incorporates Yano’s unique sound with a deeply relatable concept, making it the natural follow-up to an already impressive catalogue. With each track delving into Yano’s personal history, the album tells the story of his parents’ separation and his father’s absence through the perspective of each of his family members.
More on Jonah Yano:
Having played piano and guitar as a child, it wasn’t until Yano moved from Vancouver to Toronto in 2016 that he began putting his songs online, catching the eyes of Toronto’s thriving local music scene. Spending the next couple of years obsessively songwriting and practicing vocals, and learning technical skills, he collaborated with Toronto duo MONEYPHONE on the 2018 song “On Lock” which became an underground success. Shortly after, Yano released his first solo single “Rolex, the Ocean” with producer Joseph L’etranger. Once he began writing his full EP, he was introduced to frequent collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, who are featured on the EP’s title track, “nervous”. Yano’s work has garnered praise in major music publications like The Fader, Billboard, Complex, and Exclaim and the attention of Virgil Abloh, Benji B, and Gilles Peterson along with millions of streams on Spotify and Apple Music. Most recently, Yano released a highly praised cover of the Majestic’s “Key to Love (Is Understanding)” also with BADBADNOTGOOD, finding himself in the natural position of writing the feature length album, 2020’s souvenir.
