Lovers in Japan / Reign of Love
Producers
Lovers in Japan / Reign of Love Lyrics
[Verse 1]
Lovers, keep on the road you're on
Runners, until the race is run
Soldiers, you've got to soldier on
Sometimes even the right is wrong
[Chorus]
They are turnin' my head out
To see what I'm all about
Keepin' my head down
To see what it feels like now
But I have no doubt
One day, we're gonna get out
[Verse 2]
Tonight, maybe we're gonna run
Dreamin' of the Osaka sun
Oh, oh
Dreamin' of when the mornin' comes
[Chorus]
They are turnin' my head out
To see what I'm all about
Keepin' my head down
To see what it feels like now
But I have no doubt
One day, the sun'll come out
[Intro]
One, two, three
[Verse 1]
Reign of love
I can't let go
To the sea I offer this heavy load
Locust wind, lift me up
I'm just a prisoner in a reign of love
[Bridge]
Locust wind, here I stop
How I wish I'd spoken up to a reign of love
[Verse 2]
Reign of love
By the church we're waitin'
Reign of love
On my knees go prayin'
How I wish I'd spoken up
Away get carried on a reign of love
About
“Lovers in Japan” is the fifth track and third single of Viva la Vida. On the LP this track is coupled to “Reign of Love.”
In an interview for Entertainment Weekly in 2008, lead singer Chris Martin, when talking about the song and its title, remarked that “No one associates romance with Japan…Everyone thinks Japan is just about Hitachi and neon signs, but every time we’re there, we see these amazing sunrises. It’s very sexy.”
A slightly uptempo version of this song (the “Osaka Sun Mix”) appeared on Prospekt’s March.
An acoustic version also appeared as an iTunes pre-order bonus track.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
Martin: Guy and Will made the piano you hear on there.
Jonny Buckland: Wait, I did too!
Champion: We were in a studio in New York, this place called the Magic Shop, and it had this thing called a tack piano there, which sounds like an old honky-tonk piano, where you put little tacks in the hammers, so it sounds like more of a harpsichord almost. And so we wanted to use that kind of sound, but we didn’t have a tack piano, so rather than sample it, we went and bought an old piano from the shop up the road from our studio, and we bought a load of tacks, and me and Guy and Jon spent a couple of hours pushing tacks into the piano hammers.
Martin: The only thing is, now we don’t have anything to pin notes up with, so we have a lot of pieces of paper on the floor, and a beautiful piano.
From a 2008 interview with MTV.
According to Songfacts, bassist Guy Berryman explained to Q magazine:
Couldn’t we make our minds up? No, it’s because we didn’t want to have an extra number on the CD. To keep it concise at 10 tracks.
Drummer Will Champion added:
We just preferred to have less titles and more stuff. The album as a whole has got the most on it, but it’s the shortest. We wanted to make it almost impossible for you to not listen to it all in one go.
Also, Chris Martin said to The Sun:
We always wanted a song title which was two in one – buy one get one free. Part of the reason for having two titles in a couple of places with slashes is because Justin Timberlake did it on his last album. I just thought it was cool. You have to know how to steal and where to steal from.
- 3.Lost!
- 4.42
- 5.Lovers in Japan / Reign of Love
- 6.Yes
- 8.Viva La Vida
- 9.Violet Hill
- 10.Strawberry Swing
- 12.The Escapist