For Episode #34 of Twisted Radio Station Ruggie’s VA Ichikawa Aoi (🍩) interviewed Twisted Wonderland’s music composer Ozawa Takumi about the creation of the character songs along with Aozora Ichika, who wrote the lyrics for 11 of the 14 songs (including dorm songs).
※Note: not literal translations, only summaries of the conversations.
Ozawa: The dorm song had a really solemn and heavy feel to it, I was given completely different instructions for the solo song as something like punk rock that mixes hysteria and childishness. It starts with a slower tempo, picks up in the middle, then drops again, and that kind of emotional instability is reflected in the music itself. But it didn’t get finalized in one go. There were a lot of retakes and revisions.
Aozora: We might have struggled with this one the most, concerning what direction to go in and how to go about it.
Ozawa: Yeah, there was a sense of “What do we even do with this?” It was rough. The tempo changes suddenly, and it isn’t a clean double-time shift. It’s slightly off, and while it sounds okay when you listen to it, for the singer or musician performing it, I think that slight off-beat feeling might feel kind of unsettling.
🍩：That subtle dissonance kind of reflects how Malleus is ultimately a fae, someone fundamentally different from humans. Even though he’s lived a very long time, from the perspective of other fae he’s still pretty young. That sense of immaturity comes through in the song’s odd tempo shifts, I think.
Aozora: This applies to all the solo songs, but the lyrics change a lot depending on the character’s mental age. With Malleus, we really struggled with how to express his childishness, that immaturity.
We got input from Toboso-sensei, and she said that she wanted to bring out things like how he will throw a tantrum but then swing back into calmness to show his emotional immaturity. So we were very intentional with the word choices and phrasing.
I wrote the lyrics imagining switching between the calm, composed Malleus that everyone imagines and the not-yet-fully-grown, immature Malleus. So the tone and language shifts depending on the section.
During recording, 🐉 (Malleus’ VA Kato Kazuki) would actually change the way he sang the same melody depending on the line. He even intentionally broke his voice in some places. He gave us so many ideas, and I was so impressed at the sheer range of his vocal expression.
The lyrics sound really childish in places, but when you listen to the song itself you start to believe him. Like, “Huh, maybe staying in a dream wouldn’t be so bad.”
🍩: I felt that! Listening to this song after Book 7 you really feel how Malleus, having lived far longer than humans, gives weight to every word he speaks. That weight definitely comes through. But looking at it from a distance, you can hear how he’s saying immature things and talking about things he doesn’t quite understand. That combination of lyrics, melody, and vocal delivery really puts across who Malleus is. I thought it was an amazing solo song.
Aozora: 🐉’s voice is, of course, very mature. But in this song Malleus somehow sounds like he is crying like a child, and that’s what makes it all the more mysterious. Especially in that opening shout. His wings…
Ozawa: They unfurled again.
*Note: this is a reference to a similar conversion in the Dorm Songs interview.
Twisted Wonderland Reference Note 