A cover is how listeners filter music — and how an artist claims a lineage

The Lineage
Covers Leave

From bedroom piano takes to festival stages and two cover albums, Fujii Kaze keeps handing his attention to other people's songs — filtering music for listeners while tracing a river of influence through Japanese pop, American R&B, soul, and older standards.

—records
—in the lineage
—distinct songs
—merged artists
—original-song span

The cherry tree is split by era around its canopy — from the lower left, over the top, to the lower right: pre-1980, 1980s, 1990s, 2000–04, 2005–09, 2010s and 2020s+, with each era’s artists scattered among that sector’s blossoms and twigs. The pine runs from newer to older: 2020s+ down to pre-1960. Bubble size shows lineage weight. Hover a bubble for the artist’s name and select it for full details; filter by era, region or gender at the foot of the trees (multi-select; select again to clear).

Officially Released Covers

Tracks from the two official cover albums, HELP EVER HURT COVER (2020) and LOVE ALL COVER ALL (2022). Every row is split in two: the left half is the original (with the original artist’s portrait), the right half is Fujii Kaze’s cover — each side plays its own 30-second preview. The icon at the end opens the official YouTube release.

From Tinkering to Release: Each Time, More Official

Songs That Never Made the Album but Keep Returning

Back to the Evidence: All 276 Records, One by One

Featured artists

Scoring Method: Measuring Evidence, Not Merit

Scores measure the strength of lineage evidence, not how good a performance was. Concerts score 4, 2, 1… in the order a song appears across series; multiple shows in one series count once. Other settings score at the base rates below.

No unlimited accumulation across settings: lineage weight = highest-commitment setting + min(3, the rest × 0.5), capped at 8 points per song. Record cards show the base occasion weight; song and artist levels show the damped lineage weight.

Teenage covers (through 2014) of then-current hits count at half weight — 71% of that period’s covers were current hits versus 5% in adulthood, so the two are unequal as lineage evidence; post-debut covers of new songs are not discounted. Records marked excluded are kept but not scored.

Tokyo Jihen folds into Ringo Sheena (credits preserved); region marks an artist’s primary affiliation; gender and genre follow the dataset’s labels.

5
Cover album
4
First concert / festival series for a song
3
Piano cover video
2
Second concert series for a song; Mashup
1
Third & later concert series; livestream / clip
0
Kept but excluded

Why Covers Matter

Covers aren't résumé footnotes. Discovering music always means filtering — by our own ears, or by people who listen on our behalf first. A musician's covers do the same: he passes along songs he's already heard, practiced, and chosen to redo in public.

This matters because it's expensive. Likes and name-drops happen in bulk; a cover costs practice, rehearsal, and a public appearance, tying the performer's reputation to someone else's song. It's a costly signal — the fuller the investment, the less it looks like a whim.

It also turns attention outward: charts and recommendation engines keep it on the platform or the artist; a cover sends some back to the original song and its writer. More than that, it skips the visual packaging — not "I like how the cover looks" but one voice answering another through ear, keys, and throat. What we borrow isn't his conclusion, but the listening he's already done.

A cover reads as a public claim of kinship: which artists a musician keeps returning to, and whether he carries them onto a stage or release, reveals which tradition he's willing to shoulder. If sampling is closer to confession, a cover says it out loud: "I come from here, and I want to carry it onward." What follows traces three threads: the pull between artists, the gap between a song's age and his cover of it, and how an offhand take rises to a stage or studio version.