Nanaco Sato’s “Lust – Love Underground” starts with two people on a train and stays close to the sounds around them. “The couple on the underground / Heading to their lust” gives the song a simple scene, while the repeated “Can you hear them?” makes desire something that can be picked up among the noise. Sato is not telling their story. She is listening to what surrounds them.
The words came from the atmosphere Sato felt during the 1996 recording sessions, and the music grew from the same moment. Guitarist Dan Boutwood began the opening, then Charlie Price, James Denham and Susumu Osada joined in. The song was the first piece the musicians created together, and the recording keeps that sense of people finding their way into the same groove. A few lines become enough once the instruments start moving.
There is also something fitting about hearing this song now, after it sat for decades before the release of LUST. Sato wrote about human love and desire existing beneath the noise of the world, and the underground train gives that idea a physical place. The people pass through the city, surrounded by sounds that belong to everyone else, while somewhere in the middle of it two people are making their own noise.
