Prodigies of the guitar, finally ready to accept the idea that it is impossible to be perfect, the TarO & JirO‘s brothers are far from being amateurs. Quite the contrary, the rock duo was fed with music, and passion requires, began his career just before adolescence, at the age of 12. 20 years of career, it is also 20 years of ups and downs, ranging from unique concerts during tours in France to street performances in Japan, 20 years where the group has constantly reinvented itself, bound by this unbreakable link between brothers terribly compatible on the musical level. 10 years ago, TarO & JirO lived in London, the cradle of rock, before coming back to Japan and do not hesitate to come back to France. This year, for the first time in seven years, the two prodigies came back with a new friend drummer Takuro on the occasion of three concerts given at the Japan Touch in Lyon, Bourg-En-Bresse, and La Foisonnante in Paris. On stage, the group is unleashed, and behind, the team discovers them even more passionate. During this interview, you will go back in time to immerse yourself in the moving story of two brothers, for whom everything was not always rosy, but who never gave up. Have a nice trip !

First of all, can you introduce yourself ?

Taro : We are TarO & JirO and I am the singer and the guitarist of the band, Taro.

Jiro : I am Jiro, I play the guitar and I sing.

Takuro : I am Takuro, I am the drummer.

Your name TarO & JirO, what does it mean ?

Taro : It is actually just our name, because we are brothers. But my real name is Kimitaro, it is way too long. (laughs)

Your musical career has started when you were young, can you please talk about your paths as musicians ?

Taro : It is a long story. Jiro and I have been playing music for about 20 years, so when I was 12, I started playing the guitar, wrting songs and I wanted to have somebody else to play music with, so I just asked my younger brother Jiro ‘Play music with me’, and he was like ‘Hmm, no, but okay’.

Jiro : He almost forced me to play with him. Since I was twelve, I also started playing the guitar. First, we were just playing as children, using this to hang out and play together.

Taro : But the older we become, the more serious we started taking it. We started dreaming of becoming an international band. Then Jiro and I moved to London in the UK, in 2009, ten years ago. We sang in English, we started playing music there, that is how we started dreaming about being international musicians.

Can you describe your music universe ?

Taro : We have lot of backgrounds. We are not picky about what we listen to. We listen to anything as long as they are good, as long as we think they are good, that is why we take every kind of genre. As you said, we play a pop-rock, a progressive rock, a grunge, sometimes we are very pop, so we play everything, because we do like every kind of music.

What are your sources of inspiration ?

Jiro : Hmm, every music. Sometimes, I get inspiration from listening to jazz, sometimes just pop songs.

Taro : Sometimes, just travelling. Like now ! Actually, yesterday, Jiro and I wrote a brand new song, because we are travelling now, we feel so fresh. Travelling makes us very creative too. We see a lot of new things, we meet a lot of new people and we get creativity.

Can you talk about this creative process, who is the lyricist, the composer ?

Jiro : We both do everything. Sometimes, we write songs individually, sometimes we write songs together. Or sometimes, both of us come up with an idea and then we develop it, and create more songs.

Taro : Yeah, we do not usually write songs with anybody else, but because we are brothers and we have been playing music for 20 years, we have this big trust in each other, that’s why we can do this, we share what we come up with. We accept what we both created.

CKJ : Do you sometimes disagree with each other about the way it goes ?

Taro and Jiro : Yeah.

Jiro : It is hard to find a solution, sometimes we take time.

Taro : Most of the time, we agree with each other because we grew up listening to the same kind of music. But since we did solo projects last year, we kind of started liking different style of music too. Now we are planning on writing new songs together again, so sometimes I say to Jiro ‘Oh, I don’t feel like doing that kind of stuff anymore’ but Jiro tells me that he wants to do it. So we have to understand each other, but I like that, because I’m not the only want who writes.

Jiro : It’s always good to have differences, like tastes !

And if you had to chose one word to describe your relation as brothers, what would you chose ?

Taro : My wife ! The closest to me, this is so weird, we are so connected musically, so I don’t know, wife ! What would you say ?

Jiro : I would say best friends !

What are the messages and the feelings you want to deliver through your music ?

Jiro : Messages ? We don’t really… when we write songs, we don’t know what we want to tell to the listeners. But usually, the song tells us, when we write songs, we have the message in it, so we have to find out. We think that each song has its own character, so we don’t want to put different messages on that song. We do with the natural meaning.

Taro : It is like impressionist ! When one paint, one do not paint an apple, we do something like pops of colours, and then we decide that it looks like an apple. That’s our message, we just put lot of colours, and finally it looks like something, like ‘oh maybe we wanted to say this’.

Jiro : The song itself always tells us.

Which one of your songs is the most meaningful for you ?

Jiro : Every song, each one of them.

Taro : Yes !

Jiro : It is like our childhood. Each song is special.

Tell us a bit about “Imperfections” !

Taro : As I said, last year, we were doing our own projects individually. And this year, we reunited in Japan and decided to play music together. This was one of the first song we wrote to restart. As the title says, the meaning is imperfections. It is talking about us, because you know, in the past, we failed in a lot of things, we wanted to be successful, but we could not like stay in Japan and focus on what we had to do, we wanted to do everything, we travel a lot. We were lost at that time. But we were back and realized that we have imperfections, we are not perfect, then we can be stronger and write better songs. It was time for us to admit that we have imperfections, but it was good ! Why is that bad ? Keep going as imperfections, that is the message and that is the perfect song for us to start this project again. I could not admit that we were imperfect, I always thought ‘We have to be perfect, we have to be perfect’. But fuck it !

What can you remember from all of your experiences in the streets ?

Jiro : Street ? We’ve been busking for a long time, I think the most memorable was our first busking ever. It was in our hometown Nara, when I was ten.

Taro : You were younger, nine !

Jiro : Nine ? (laughs) He was twelve or thirteen. And I was really young. And I remember I was really really nervous to play in the street, but I don’t know, there was this really strong passion, as soon as we performed in front of the people, we saw that we wanted to be musicians in the future together.

CKJ : Do you remember what song you played this day or was it improvisation ?

Jiro : We only had two songs ! Taro wrote the songs, back then, I was too little to write the songs.

Taro : But I remember, I asked him to write lyrics with me, because I did not liked writing lyrics at that time. So I forced him to write lyrics with me.

Jiro : But I was nine years old, I was really bad.

Taro : When we listen to those songs now, they sound so childish, but that’s cute ! (laughs) That is how we grew !

Jiro : My first song was about beautiful sunset.

So this is clearly not your first time in France, and last week you performed two concerts, in Lyon and Bourg-en-bresse, how was it ?

Jiro : Oh, it was great, amazing ! The crowd was really powerful, crazy too, and I liked it !

Taro : I think we really enjoyed this tour this time, especially the one at Japan Touch, we had like a thousand of people in front of us. That never happened in Japan yet, we felt like we suddenly became this superstar in France, and scared of going back to Japan, because we have to go back to the streets, with no one around. It was great, but we do feel like we want to come back.

What are your upcoming projects for 2020 ?

Taro : For this year, we invited the drummer Takuro to our band. It’s Jiro who found him when he was doing his solo project last year. Takuro joined him and that’s how we met him, he’s a great drummer. For next year, we’re going to continue what we are going now, with Takuro too, but we want to release new album too, we want to make something we want to create now. It’s going to be an exciting year !

Do you have for your french fans and the new ones a message ?

Taro : Bonjour ! [Hello] Yeah, thank you so much for being a such wonderful audience and for supporting us, because we can enjoy playing music. Thank you so much for supporting us. We’ll definitely come back, and I hope we can improve our French too because we want to talk to them in French. But for now it’s so frustrating, because we can’t talk to them in French, we’ll do our best to learn French too.

Jiro : We are really happy to be back in France this time, it has been seven years since the last time we performed here. Some people saw us seven years ago, and I’m really glad that they still remember us and came to our show. Thank you so much. And, yeah, we are really happy to be back playing together, so hopefully we can come back in France again.

We would like to thank Jéhanne Bivel for having organized this interview, AsieExpo and YumeKeun for making this tour possible, La Foisonnante and Taro & Jiro for this beautiful discussion. 

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