Sakurai reveals that he wrote the lyrics for Kirby Air Riders’ main theme song, explains why he kept it under wraps

Director Masahiro Sakurai was behind the lyrics of the main theme song in Kirby Air Riders, he’s revealed. That news comes from an interview that just went up on Nintendo’s website.

Sakurai said that he hadn’t spoke about this previously because he believes “you shouldn’t have that work’s world associated with a single person.” He added that he wouldn’t like it “if people thought that the world of Kirby Air Riders was a certain way because I’m the one who made it.”

Sakurai explained in the interview:

“By the way, regarding the lyrics for the theme song, I haven’t mentioned it yet since I wanted to keep it under wraps, but I wrote them myself.

Animation directors, for instance, sometimes use a different name when releasing music, right? As a child, I really couldn’t understand why they would do that. Now I understand that you shouldn’t have that work’s world associated with a single person. Of course, there might be completely different reasons for it too.

It would bother me a great deal if people thought that the world of Kirby Air Riders was a certain way because I’m the one who made it. I want to keep fantasy as fantasy, to have a certain theme song because this or that happened in the Kirby world. I’m only bringing this up because we are discussing the circumstances behind the main theme this time around…”

He went on to talk more about the theme song in the same quote, stating:

“I had been thinking of the main theme as basically one song, but the lyrics I wrote had two sides to them. On the surface, the song expresses the joy of being together with the machines, but underneath all that is Zorah’s wish to regain his lost freedom as well. Iwadare sent me three great songs, and it occurred to me that we could use the third song, his third take, and integrate it into a Zorah-themed ballad of sorts.

But I was a little lost on how to actually make it work. The track that was sent to me was really just the first step. From there, it was going to be a very long road until it became a complete song. Even so, I decided to go ahead with it because I’d personally never heard a song where the lyrics conveyed two completely different sets of emotions through layers of connotations. This felt novel to me, so I asked Iwadare to take on the challenge.”

Speaking of Kirby Air Riders, we also got to hear from Sakurai this week about the general approach to Kirby Air Riders’ music and wanting kids to be able to sing along. Read more about that here.