When I was young, I didn’t know who I was. I used to hang out with friends to drink at midnight. We all had thirst at the bottom of our minds. And we listened to music a lot.

With their breezy folky rock sound, the Tokyo-based trio Sunny Day Service (サニーデイ・サービス) has been a special soundtrack for such young guys in Japan. Formed in 1992, they’ve had an eight-year break, and then came back in 2008.

This year, they released their 10th album named “Dance To You”. As the title suggests, one of this record’s concepts is “to make listeners dance”. Actually, female dancer is featured in the video of “Setsuna” (“Moment”), which is second cut from this album.

In the middle of the video, an actress in a pink dress imitates playing the guitar, which seems to express a precious moment with a girl we once loved. It reminds me of Haruki Murakami’s novel “Norwegian Wood”.

On this album, bassist Takashi Tanaka of course played all of the bass guitar, but singer and guitarist Keiichi Sokabe also played drums except two songs – because drummer Harusige Maruyama has been ill and temporarily left the band in February. It makes Keiichi sing, “You are here because you are not here,” in the song called “Sakura Super Love”. He said in the Natalie magazine, “I feel that Harusige makes us run even if he didn’t play drums”.

Keiichi compares a rock band to a family. He said, “Even if a family doesn’t work well and they live separately, family is still family. And I think rock bands are similar”. Through his career, he has been singing about something lost or something that hurt. We can’t help losing things we treasure, nevertheless we have to keep living, so as to Keiichi keeps singing.

Stream “Dance to You” LP on Spotify.