I met Hiroaki San for the first time in 2017 when he was in Singapore on tour with Defiled. He was on bass and the ripped the stage with his White Mockingbird, basically.
The members of the band were open to mingling with the fans with autographs and chats after their set. I took a photo with Hiroaki San and exchanged Facebook contacts. I reached out to him online as soon as I could and gave him honest compliments for show. He generously responded and kept in touch, on and off, over the years.
In 2021, Hiroaki San have been noticing my painting and drawing by pressing “like” and by leaving notes of encouragement. I can’t help it but to ask him if he would like to have one of my drawings and what would he like (me to draw). He replied “Stratocaster”.
I draw better SGs as I have always been fascinated by the look for the devil’s horn, and I have been drawing SGs since I was a teen. Drawing a decent Devil’s Horn Gibson Classic would be a “Walk in the park”. Stratocaster? Goodness, for the life of me.
Since, Hiroaki San was so supportive and I did not want to disappoint him. It was not my finest guitar drawing, but I did my best by adding other elements like Disco Ball, Amplifiers and Microphone with lots of Crayon Paste colour. I took a photo and showed Hiroaki San and ask if I should re-do it? He replied: This is just fine. Hiroaki San asked he could do anything in return? I proposed a guest appearance on vocals for our song “Assassination of the Emperor Tuna”. He said “Yes”. I barter traded a piece of child-like crayon art for a guest vocal in a record?
The song was about Tuna Sashimi, one of Japan’s most loved cuisine. To have a Japanese artiste appear in a Japanese-Food-related Thrash Metal Song, written by song writers from Singapore and Thailand was a great honor indeed.
Just when I thought the honor cannot be higher, Hiroaki San took the trouble to research and found a 900 year old Japanese Haiku (Traditional 3 liner poem that tells a full story, talk about the art of summarising) as his lyric for the guest appearance. I am beyond stoked.
I made a comment to a new found metal-head friend saying that “We have new song launch, and I am passionately promoting it. No one cares about the releases for small-time band like ESP, but I do it anyway before music is a big part of my life. Especially music from my band.”
Her reply was encouraging. She said “People don’t know what they are missing, small bands make the best songs.” So, here you go, “Assassination of the Emperor Tuna”, available on all streaming platform and for sale in Bandcamp. We have come a long way for this. Thank you for reading.
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