Northern Crossroads

By: Kayla Sturdevant

“We are a metalcore gen band from Tokyo and actually our name Northern Crossroads means a point where a bunch of people get together, like... I’m from Chile, Santiago, in South America, really far from here and all our members are from different parts of Japan," Javier Gonzalez, writer and guitarist for Northern Crossroads, explained the meaning of their band name. Gonzalez and his band mates created their group only three months ago.

"So when we made this band, what we wanted to do was like do the music we love and while we do it we want to do it together as one. That’s pretty much where the name came from. This band is our crossroad,” he continued. As for the direction for the band, Gonzalez only looks to one goal.

"We actually don’t have a vision of being popular or trying to get money or anything. It’s just what we love, putting our soul into every piece…,” he confessed. While money doesn't seem to interest the band, they want to focus on the art and enjoyment they feel performing.

“Our future direction, we still don’t know. I don’t know, just step by step. For now, we just want to keep on doing gigs and making people like our band doing the music we love," Gonzalez summed up.

“We’re still a little band. We don’t have much fans. Every person… they pay to see us play. That means alot to us… That support means alot to us and while they’re doing that support, we want to connect with them. We want them… to enjoy their music, to feel what we felt when we did the songwriting," he began describing his band to fan relationship.

Yuji Ishihara, the vocalist of the group, explained how he became interested in music.

"The reason why I like music, when I was an elementary student I got into the musical theatre performance in school. When I sang, I liked to look at the expressions of the kids to look if their expression is happy because it's a happy song, or sad if it's a sad song. The change of expressions on their faces intrigued me," Ishihara confessed. Gonzalez feels similarly about music and his connection to it.

“I just feel when I do music people can connect with myself and express myself in a different way so that’s pretty much why I do this all the time. This thing inside me, [Yuji] has it too, in every note he sings… It’s pretty much that we want to express ourselves doing the thing we love,” Gonzalez told about his connection to music. The entire band's initiative aligns with these members attitudes toward their art.

“We love doing music because music has the power of moving people’s hearts. You can feel happy to a piece, or feel sad, like a certain emotion. We can make people feel the same as us,” Gonzales expressed. While the band sticks to their metalcore genre, their musical interests don't remain stagnant.

“I like a lot of progressive metal, like metal core gen too... and all the different underground scene bands. [Yuji] likes a lot of catchy melodies… so it’s like a bunch of music mixing related to our metalcore pieces,” he described their music styles. With these influences, Gonzalez incorporates these into his writing process.

“I mean, I write the lyrics, in English. I ask every member, for example, when you hear this piece of music, what do you feel? What do you think?... and we say okay we’re going to talk about this and we’re going to go in this direction and then I write. And all our music I write it, and Mickey, our other guitarist… So basically all the words are me and the music is Mickey,” he explained. Northern Crossroads appears to love what they do and want to continue their group for as long as they can.