Odorouyo Baby

Written in 1991 and 1992 / Recorded in 1994

The tune stemmed from a spontaneous jam Elegance had in August or September 1991, which was mostly led by Kataoka, the bass player, who gave the basic riff and the chord progression for the chorus and played them repeatedly for a while. Then, after having a smoking break, I got back to the studio and played the piano there for finding a suitable chord progression for bridging the riff and the chorus. When all other guys came back to the studio, I explained the rough structure of the entire tune and began to practice playing it together.
Within a few weeks, the intro, an arrangement of the chorus section, and the outro were added to finalise the creation stage. Though I don't remember who's idea it was, but the outro was actually suggested by someone in the band to make it like The Doors' version of Gloria.
It was followed by writing of ambitious lyrics by myself, aiming at delivering philosophical arguments partly in the form of reading style. For memorising the lyrics, I made a very rough demo version of this tune before we first played it live in October 1991.

The band continued to play this tune regardless to changes in personnel that eventually led us to rename ourselves from Elegance to Culotte in the following year. The song became a kinda theme song for us and was picked up to be a material for our official studio recording in summer 1992. For saving the studio time, obviously for saving our money, I prepared all the keyboard parts pre-programmed in a digital sequencer by May or June of the same year.
Culotte further continued to play Odorouyo Baby, literally means 'Let's dance, baby', at every gig they played even after the departure of the original drummer, who took part in the initial spontaneous jam by Elegance, in mid-1995. Prior to that, I asked them to retry recording this song because I was not satisfied with the mixing of the official one. The same programme was used for the keyboard parts and the recording was engineered by ourselves so that we could make the best result.

As for the lyrics, it didn't take long for me to regret to have written the so-called philosophical lyrics and especially in later years of Culotte, I felt a bit ashamed of singing some silly lines. Therefore, when I found the master tape of the 1994 studio recording, I made a remix with removing my voice parts. In this way, I guess it will become clearer the idea behind the title of the song - this was meant to be regarded as a kind of dance music.