Leo Ieiri made her sensational debut with the single "Sabrina" in February 2012, when she still was a high school student. The then 17-year-old Ieiri filled the song with her explosive feelings about adolescent angst, but she's been steadily expanding her skills ever since then, making her now able to sing a wide variety of songs in captivating ways.
Her latest and fifth studio album, titled "Time" and released earlier this year on the Victor Entertainment label, "focuses on me as seen from various angles. This is full of my feelings and emotions," Ieiri said.
She'll set out on a national tour from early May to promote the album.
A native of Fukuoka Prefecture, Ieiri, 23, won the Japan Record Awards for best new artist at the end of 2012, after she had released "Sabrina." Her discography also includes "5th Anniversary Best," her first compilation of hit songs, released in February 2017.
With her keen eyes and clear, strong voice -- as if to match the image of her name Leo, or lion -- Ieiri started her career as a singer-songwriter who powerfully expressed her distrust of adults and society and her youthful loneliness. But the new studio album, her first release in 19 months, seems to indicate she's been released from her initial appeal -- in a good way.
Six of the 13 songs on the album were composed and written without her involvement, and yet the quality of her music has deepened. It's almost impossible to choose the best song on this album. All of them have their own strong, individual characteristics. Ieiri used her versatility to freely and finely express the nuance of each song.
"I like creating music. I also like singing while giving an expressive performance," Ieiri said. "When I was singing songs that other artists created for me, I came to realize how much I like to express myself.
"I think this way: Each song is a person. A composer forms its body and I infuse it with a soul at the end. That process is almost the same as creating [a song] on my own."
During her teens, however, creating her own music was inseparable from life itself. She was frustrated with her family and spending her days at a combined junior high and high school for girls that involved peculiar human relationships. A life of just traveling to and from school was distressing, but she turned these experiences into songs. "For me, [creating a song] was a way to identify something ambiguous and gloomy in my mind and digest it," she recalls.
When she was 13, Ieiri enrolled in Ongakujuku Voice, a music school in Fukuoka that has produced such renowned singers as Yui and Ayaka. She soon started to attract the attention of people in the music industry.
She moved to Tokyo alone while she was still a high schooler. Her father was so upset about her departure, he told her: "I'll never allow you back into this house."
She made her debut surrounded by people who had high expectations for her, and outwardly she appears to have smoothly and consistently pursued her music ever since.
"In fact, I felt pressured and impatient in my first year," she said. "But feeling joy and feeling pain are similar for me because they're both stimulating. People around me pressured me to work hard, probably expecting it would make me display my abilities. I recognized that they were not treating me as a mere child."
Since she was young, music has been a way for Ieiri to face her feelings. After making her debut, she realized it was also a priceless instrument for connecting with numerous people.
Ieiri saw that again last year when she held her first concert at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan hall, a dream venue for musicians.
"I was so happy that I could see the faces of the audience very clearly," she said. "I get nervous if I don't see them. They looked thrilled. I was very pleased to see that."
She titled the album "Time" partly to express her gratitude to the people who have given up their valuable time for her music.
"Unlike money and kind words, which some people can afford to give as much as they want, we're only given 24 hours each day," she said. "I'm grateful there are people who've spared some of their limited time for me. I really feel they bring me into existence by contributing part of their lives to me. I'll make every possible effort to offer them good music in return."
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