Ones2Watch Home

Photo: SJ Spreng

Emotive pop portability, a wanting to live life like a movie scene, and emulating early aughts radio punk energy with a Toys”R” Us purchased guitar make Bay Area native Takayoshi’s debut EP, songs that can fit in your pocket, a perfect addendum to your summer’s wanderlust walkabout. If mobile music is prototypically American, channeled with cars, Walkmans, and iPhones in mind, then songs you can fit in your pocket is an elevated continuation. A reconstructive mnemonic prompt from a second-generation Chinese-Japanese American, stitching in his version of sonic snackables, bite-sized caches of catchy tunes to the tradition, a firmware update to music born in garages, storing cars, skateboards, and other vestiges of American freedom that music propels. 

Despite not coming from a music family, and struggling with the new immigrant trope of needing to be a doctor or lawyer, Takayoshi developed a fiendishly focused creative work ethic, teaching himself guitar, songwriting, and song production from scratch. Using music, as most natural introverts do, to survive the trials of high school, and to force himself to be more extroverted through expression, Takayoshi took his “most unproductive way of making music” to the next level, with a prodigious output of releasing new music every two weeks. Aided by the oversized cuteness of his spirit animal the Capybara, Takayoshi paired his music output with corresponding social content, and with momentum surging he decided to do music full-time in February of this year. 

The EP itself is no misnomer, emerging as a tidy brief collection of songs that energize, deliver poignantly, and then shift into the next track. Starting with "hometown," an elegy to being misunderstood, boisterous with Blink 182-like drums and guitars then double-timing into a messy understanding of loneliness. "Wannabe" is a pure retro gift, an obvious single, as it has the nervous yet happy energy of the pop-punk era its meant to champion, teased with an amazing opening lyric intro, “Hey mom, I wanna be the dude in my dreams…” The middle hinge track of the EP is “sensitive,” a song leaning more into angsty indie pop, with some softer unamplified guitar parts mixed in with a raucous chorus about you guessed it, being sensitive.

“Want you to stay” is the most longing and romantic leaning track of the bunch, a melodic, picking guitar-backed track that narrates a typical relationship gone sour. Ending on “too late,” the EP drifts into a more downtempo Dashboard Confessional emo vibe, a slower tempo that allows Takayoshi’s songwriting chops to shine, a beautiful internal check-in on anxiety that nebulously ends in just over a minute.

However you like to take your songs with you, its not too late to pocket Takayoshi’s excellent EP, and if you don’t know where to go, know having this as your soundtrack is its own destination.

Listen to songs that can fit in your pocket below: