Miwa was born in Hayama, Kanagawa, however moved to Tokyo at a young age. Since her father had a great love for music, Miwa naturally began to enjoy music as she grew up.
Miwa began writing songs at 15. She began to teach herself how to play the guitar after she entered high school, but gave up and paid for professional lessons after discovering she wasn't making much progress on her own. Her high school had a ban on students having part-time jobs. Despite this, Miwa secretly worked, and eventually used these savings by her second year of high school to buy a Gibson J-45 guitar. After this, Miwa played live concerts mostly around Shimokitazawa in Tokyo and in Okinawa in the summer (her parents had a house there). Due to her high school also having a ban on students working in the entertainment business, she had to do these lives in secret (without even telling her school friends). In this time, Miwa released two self-published independent singles, "Song for You/Today" and "Soba ni Itai Kara" in 2007 and 2008.
Miwa was signed to Sony Music Entertainment Japan during her third year of high school. She debuted as an artist in 2010, while attending Keio University. Her debut single, "Don't Cry Anymore," was chosen to be used for the drama Nakanai to Kimeta Hi's theme song. The single was a minor commercial success, breaking the top 20 on Oricon's single charts and being certified by the RIAJ as selling 100,000 full length cellphone downloads a month after its release. In April 2010, the song won the award for best drama theme song at the 64th The Television Drama Academy Awards. Miwa released her second single, "Little Girl," in late June. Her third single, "Change," was the twelfth opening theme song for the Bleach anime, and was a top 10 single.
Miwa considers her favorite Western musicians to be Sheryl Crow, Deep Purple, Carole King, Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift. Her favorite Japanese musicians are Aiko, Angela Aki, Radwimps and Yuki.
Miwa released her first album Guitarissimo on April 6, 2011 (was scheduled to release a week earlier on end of March but was delayed due to the TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami and its aftereffects). The charts performance was miwa's best overall: the album reached No. 1 in the Oricon's album charts, making Miwa the first Heisei period-born solo singer to reach a No. 1 on the album charts in the history of the Oricon.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel
Website: https://www.miwa-web.com/sp/bio/
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So I got fed-up with the music I was listening and playing all the time, even surfing on Spotify didn’t bring much of interest; there’s just so much music that sounds all the same. Surfing in Youtube searching Japanese rock group Loudness’ old song, Youtube started to recommend Japanese music in my feed. At first I just ignored, but then thought why not and clicked one - it was Miwa’s ”Don’t cry anymore”, so nice song and nice voice. Started to look more Miwa’s songs and found ”chAngE”, which was totally different than ballad ”Don’t cry anymore”. I liked ”chAngE” a lot and it started to spin in my head so much that decided to make an instrumental version of it - or at least an instrumental influenced my ”chAngE”. Played it with my new Epiphone Les Paul Express mini guitar and uploaded it in to my Youtube channel:
”chAngE”:
”Don’t cry anymore”:
I still plan to do an instrumental of the ”Don’t cry anymore” at some point. Anyway Miwa was a door for me in to totally new world of music; Japanese pop (J-pop) and rock (J-Rock). Lots of great groups with huge talent and browsing continues. Will post some of the most interesting ones in this blog - there are really good rock and metal groups there as well. Interested? Follow my blog’s J-Pop and J-Rock tags!
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