Courtesy of Victor/Speedstar

When UA debuted a decade ago, it was clear from the first note that here was something different. She didn’t mince, she wasn’t waif-like and—most shocking—she could sing. Unlike your typical Japanese idol whose voice surfaces strangled and lifeless, UA’s emerges from the depths and flows upward to the skies.

Pressed in an interview at a Daikanyama café to name a Japanese singer who has influenced her, she’s stumped, unable to think of a single one. “Being from Osaka, there was a lot of soul music around,” she begins. “Artists like Aretha Franklin or Janis Joplin who really sing out loud were initial inspirations. But even then I soon realized that as a Japanese, it was unnatural for me to imitate them without the context of their experiences and the times they lived in. I realized that my ‘soul’ was something different.”

UA’s early work was often in the black music-influenced ’90s pop style “Shibuya-kei,” but unlike the current generation of Japanese divas and MCs aping African-Americans, she soon proved herself a musical adventurer. She first teamed up with roots rocker Kenichi Asai in the supergroup Ajico, then with a series of avant-electronica producers on songs that placed her in the company of Björk. More recently on Sun and then Breathe, she launched off into jazz and improvisational territory.

So it comes as something of a surprise to find UA returning firmly to the pop fold on her latest and seventh release, Golden Green. While there are one or two leftfield outings, the album is a highly accessible blend of downtempo electronic beats with plush string and horn arrangements that isn’t so far removed in approach from artists like Dido or Portishead.

A wish to reclaim one’s audience is of course a good motivator to get back to more approachable territory. “It’s been ten years since I debuted, and during that time I’ve always recorded for myself,” she explains. “This was the first time I made an album with the hope that it would be heard by many people. I finally got used to the idea.”

But her attempt to reach out wasn’t simply in hopes of returning to her platinum status of a decade ago. It turns out that a move UA and her son made three years ago from Tokyo to the countryside, where she now grows her own rice, provided the background.

An environmental theme permeates Golden Green, which also happens to be the English translation of the name of the lead single. “Until now I wasn’t really strongly opinionated,” she relates. “But with Golden Green I began to think of myself as a citizen not of a particular country but of the Earth—and that was something I wanted to communicate. Rather than my personal feelings, I wanted to express something more universal. That doesn’t necessarily equal pop, but in the process of creating this album I felt a new path open up for me.”

It’s not that UA, whose stage name means both “flower” and “death” in Swahili, set out to do an environmental album per se, but that the ideas that were cropping up in songs she was writing led naturally to that outcome. “Songs are places for hopes and dreams,” she says. “It’s only after these come up in my songs that they take form in my life.”

One such outcome of Golden Green was that UA was invited by a leading radio station to host a program about the island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific. She had sung about the island, whose existence is threatened by global warming, in the title track “Ogon no Midori.” “J-Wave picked up on that lyric and sent me there to do a radio program on the environment,” she says. “It was a serious situation. The island is going to sink under rising seas. It was tough to see, and made me rethink my lifestyle.”

In the broad outlines of her career—the albums, film roles (her latest is in comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto’s blockbuster Dainipponjin), commercial endorsements and celebrity appearances—UA doesn’t seem so different from any other Japanese entertainer. But how many roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the mud of their own rice paddy?

UA never seemed comfortable with the geinokai (entertainment world), and sounds relieved to have left it behind. “I’ve had the chance to make a lot of friends since I’ve moved,” she says. “I didn’t think I would be able to become friends with locals. Being famous creates a distance between you and others, but out there they don’t really know me as an artist that well.”

Discovered working in an Osaka jazz lounge after her graduation from art college, Kaori Shima’s travels as UA have already taken her to more places at 35 than most J-pop artists will probably go in a lifetime. Losing her father at a young age and now raising her son alone after last year’s divorce from actor/model Jun Murakami, she also knows a thing or two about overcoming hardship. But throughout all the changes in artistic direction, world travel and questing for meaning, UA’s instantly recognizable voice and ability to stay true to herself are constants. One suspects they’ll continue to hold her in good stead.

Liquidroom, July 24. Golden Green is available on Victor/Speedstar. See concert listings (popular) for details.

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