What is a bicycle? A vehicle. A means of transportation.
But it feels like it’s more than that.
Speeding along at night, feeling helpless.
Excitedly touring the first town we lived in after leaving home.
The look on my son’s face as he pedalled with his own feet for the first time.
The sunset we saw with my daughter riding behind us on the way home from nursery school.

No matter how digital the world becomes, we still pedal with our own feet. That’s why we started this series, believing that analog vehicles are filled with the human heart. This is a story that begins with that person and a bicycle.

YeYe:
“Did you see that grandfather and little boy who just passed us? They were riding a brand-new, shiny bike.”

During the shoot, YeYe paid close attention to everyone who passed by. When she’s outside, she notices everything. She says she’s always been that way.

“I’ll think things like, ‘That person looks like they might have a headache,’ or ‘They had a jacket on earlier, but now they’ve taken it off.’ I react to so many little things that my head gets busy, and I get tired. That’s why I’m basically a homebody. When I’m on a bike, people pass by quickly, so I can be a bit less sensitive and that feels easier.”

Based in Kyoto, YeYe has built her career as a singer-songwriter. That sensitivity seems to connect directly to the delicate, emotionally resonant music that draws people in.

She says she became a musician “by chance.” At nineteen, a friend invited her to enter a live music contest. The prize was one million yen. At the time, she really wanted a DSLR camera, so the amount caught her attention and she joined. Soon after, a label reached out, she began writing her own songs, and before she knew it, nearly sixteen years had passed.

She had always loved music but for her, it was simply part of everyday life. “Like taking a bath, riding a bike, eating breakfast.” Something naturally there. Something that was simply herself. Even now, when she’s performing live, she sometimes finds herself wondering, Why am I singing here? It almost sounds as though YeYe herself still sees her life as a musician as something fresh and surprising.

When she sings, she feels like herself, exactly as she is. But when she gets on her bike, she says it’s like “levelling up by two stages.” The first day she rode a tokyobike, her body felt impossibly light, moving faster than she could imagine, as if she had grown wings. She’s been riding it for more than ten years now.

“In Kyoto, the Kamo River runs through the city, and you can ride straight down along the riverbank into town. The road is bumpy, but I love shooting through it on my bike. tokyobike makes you want to go fast. I’ve always been impatient by nature, and maybe that part of me comes out when I’m riding.

At night, when I have time to myself, I sometimes go all out on empty roads. I grew up in the countryside, where there were roads with hardly any cars, and you could just keep pedalling forever. Riding at night brings those memories back.”

Even after her child was born seven years ago and she started using a typical “mom bike,” she still chooses her tokyobike whenever she’s traveling alone, threading through familiar Kyoto streets along routes that exist only in her own personal map. She owns two bikes, even though one would technically be enough. There was a reason for that.

“After my child was born, people would say things like, ‘Your music has changed,’ or ‘You sound more like a mom now.’ And I hated that. They’d say my lyrics were about my child, or my expression had changed but I hadn’t done anything like that at all.”  She felt uncomfortable with the image others unconsciously projected onto her, the blending of “musician YeYe” and “mother YeYe.” She didn’t want those identities mixed together.

When she rides her tokyobike alone, it’s a way of confirming that the part of her that is not a mother still exists. She says it’s something she absolutely needs in order to remain herself.

When YeYe released her new album Horse County this October, her first in five years, it unexpectedly included her child’s voice.

It was the first album she recorded entirely at home. YeYe handled the vocals and piano accompaniment completely on her own. Between songs, you can hear the soft chichi-chi of a gas stove lighting, and her child’s voice returning home from school. The sounds of everyday life blend naturally with her singing.

“I’ve made music in lots of ways, being in a band, having other people produce my work but this time I wanted to make something different. Something more personal, closer to myself. Just me. That’s why I decided to record at home. At first, I didn’t want my child’s voice in there at all. Every time he came home from school, I’d stop recording. But eventually, that started to feel wrong. I realised that maybe I was trying too hard to exclude anything ‘mother-like,’ and in doing so, I was leaving my own self behind. This is part of me too. I don’t need to force boundaries or lie. Little by little, I came to feel that it was okay to leave things as they are.”

Five years passed after her previous album because she felt completely emptied out. There was a time when she had no idea what to create next.

“Maybe I’d set my last album as a kind of personal finish line. After it was done, I felt empty, almost hollow. Some time passed, and then one day, out of nowhere, I thought, ‘Piano.’ Before I knew it, I had bought a used one.”

The large piano arrived at her home. Until then, she had never written music on an acoustic piano. Alone, she began to play, and over the course of a year and a half, the songs slowly took shape, one by one.

“I’ve always had a lot of support from other people when making music, so somewhere inside, I felt like I had to meet expectations. Without realising it, I’d started making music for someone else. While working on this album, my partner once arranged the first song for cello and played it. It sounded beautiful but for some reason, it made me unbearably sad. I couldn’t stop crying.

I realised that I didn’t want this song to be taken away from me. That was the first time I understood that I’d made something purely for myself.”

As this album was being created, my partner arranged the first song on the album and played it on cello. It was amazing, but for some reason it made me sad, and I couldn't stop crying. I didn't want someone to take this song away from me. That's when I realised that for the first time, I had written a song that was truly for me. It's said that it's harder to cheat on an analog piano than on a digital instrument. The weight of your fingers is directly reflected in the sound, so you can't lie. At first, I was intimidated by the feeling that I had to face it head-on."

Even so, she continued to play the keys as if to confirm for herself. This reminds me of YeYe, who pedalled her bicycle alone at night when no one else was around.

“I think both digital and analog have their strengths. That’s true in songwriting, too, I want to use both in a good balance. But somewhere in my heart, I think I trust analog things a little more.”

A bicycle. A piano. Both are moved by your own strength. Hearing her talk, it’s easy to understand why YeYe instinctively reached for them when she wanted to be herself again.

Most of the album was created entirely alone. But the final track includes her partner’s accompaniment alongside her vocals.

“He was at home like always, playing the piano, and I just naturally leaned into it. It felt like making music as part of everyday life. I made this album thinking I had to see it through on my own but realising that this, too, is a valid form of my expression felt important.”

After a long period of solitary immersion, YeYe found herself able to create with others again. Perhaps that’s because she’d come closer to a version of herself that can’t be shaken by anyone else.

“Recently, my son learned how to ride a bike,” she says. “So I’m thinking of going to buy him a tokyobike.”

Soon, instead of riding together, they’ll ride side by side, each on their own bicycle, moving forward together. It feels like a family scene that could only belong to YeYe.