REVIEW: YUINO - ワワソンコ // hua hua sonqo
A warm-hearted testament to a life spent on the road from a young folk singer worth watching
38:35 // January 10th, 2025 // self-released
Bright-eyed and seemingly never more than a heartbeat away from a world-beating smile, Yuino Takeyama reinvents the old-world ideal of the vagrant bard with youthful optimism and earnest spirituality. Travelling the world with her guitar, she builds intercultural bridges through music, lives her life in harmony with nature, and plays underground live shows when her apparently endless itinerary whisks her back through her native Japan. Although she records as YUINO, she is a published author under her birth name for her memoir of the hitchhiking journey she made across Canada aged 18 (a partial English-language summary of which is available on this blog).
This particular trip was eventually terminated by the pandemic, but she went on to spend the bulk of her early 20s wandering through India, Tibet, Nepal, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina; according to her website, by the time she turned 23 she had performed live at Machu Picchu, trained with a shaman in the Peruvian Amazon, and at one point attempted to build her own house in Japan while living in a minivan (only to be interrupted by said vehicle exploding on her). As far as taking one’s life into one’s own hands goes, you could do far worse.
For many of us, that level of trekking and oddjobbing and rootlessness would amount first and foremost to a burning anxiety over where to build one’s future, only partially offset by a lifetime’s worth of weary anecdotes, but Takeyama’s overwhelming cheer and vitality tell a different story, raising her art and travels from an itinerant curiosity to a wholesome source of joy.
This impression suffuses practically every second of her debut full-length ワワソンコ // hua hua sonqo, which I deeply regret discovering a year after its release as it would have made a perfect companion for many of my own travels in 2025 and would have placed high in my year-end wrapup as a standout folk record of the year. Its eight songs see YUINO reach for simple yet far-reaching insights accrued from her life on the road, and ground them in buoyant fingerpicked melodies. Her song structures prove so robust that it is no great leap to imagine them being crash-tested across multiple continents (the only exception being the opener “日生まれたあなたへ // to you, born today”, which treads closer to a saccharine New Age reverie and, to my ears, lacks the earthy charm of the tracks to come). All these tracks are all reportedly inspired by YUINO’s encounters with the Quechua people of the Andes, but at their best they accomplish what any number of great folksongs have done, magnifying her experience into something gloriously universal.
Take the allegory for steady growth and self-acceptance she narrates over the early highlight “白い鳥 // White Bird”, or the irresistable lilt of her ode to hiking on “口笛 // Whistling”: these songs brim with humanity at both their most specific and most generalised, never taking more than a stanza or so to pivot from the former (White bird, under the twilight sky / Do not be afraid to stay here) to the latter (Do not be afraid to love yourself / before anything else).
The music tends to reflect YUINO’s inexhaustible joie de vivre, its make-up sparse but its tone generally jovial, each track rooted in sprightly guitar parts supported with pared-back chamber-style arrangements (perhaps heard best on against roots reggae on “へ贈ろう // Skyward Gift”). With its intricate fingerpicking patterns, “いつか出逢う君との物語 // to dear Kokoro-chan” recalls Ichiko Aoba, whose own engagement with the natural world and off-piste communities will make a natural point of comparison for many. However, where Aoba’s work often strikes me as an elliptical extension of nature’s mystique and enchantment, there’s an open-hearted frankness to Takeyama’s writing that reminds me far more of songwriters from older generations, like Konomi Sasaki or the far too soon departed Nobue Kawana. Much like the latter, YUINO extends her hand with such presence that even at her most misty-eyed it is hard to fault her for her sentimentalism, as on the closer-in-effect “人生の旅 // Journey of Life”:
根拠なくだれかを愛したりするけど
それはきっとなぜかとわからなくないで
We love someone without a reason,
but we do not need to know why
私は知らないことだらけ
だから純粋にこころで感じるさ
There are so many things I do not know,
and that is why I feel everything with my heart
生まれながらにしてここにいる
ただ空に向かう花のように
I have been here since the moment I was born,
like a flower blooming toward the sky
生まれながらにしてここにいる
私もあなたも旅に途中
I have been here since the moment I was born
You and I are floating in this journey
N.B. YUINO’s Bandcamp includes English translations for the entire album.As both a debut album and a succinct digest of YUINO’s perspective as a dedicated traveler, ワワソンコ // hua hua sonqo delivers convincingly and succinctly, and it’s a flattering reflection of the album that it hardly demands an encore — not that one needs to look far to find one, as a quick skim of YUINO’s Instagram live clips reveals a number of non-album or unrecorded tracks and leaves the possibility of a follow-up record as an all but tangible prospect. I’ll continue to follow her journey and will be keeping an eager eye out for new material, but it’s remarkable how much assurance and closure she conveys across this one, unassuming set of tunes — with a package this fully-formed, why look a gift horse in the mouth? After all, ワワソンコ // hua hua sonqo is about nothing if not stumbling upon simple wisdom and lasting contentment in unexpected places, and if it promises much the same to those who fall down an opportune set of cracks on Bandcamp, Instagram or the humble website you are currently reading from, well, who’s to complain?
8/10
Further listening:
Konomi Sasaki - Ninjin
Nobue Kawana - Nobue no Umi
Ichiko Aoba - Karisome Otome
Eddie Marcon - Yahho no Potori
Yumbo - Onibi