Pop Sensation

After 11 studio albums and a trying stint in New York, Member and singer Crystal Kay’s passion for music remains undimmed.

Is she famous?” a youngster asks as Crystal Kay strides into the Club’s Bowling Center for a photo shoot. With her easy smile and flowing mane of dyed ash-gray hair, the singer-songwriter appears at ease in front of the camera.

Crystal Kay Williams (to use her given name) has been in the public eye since she started doing commercial voice work at the age of 4. The Yokohama native released her first single at 13. Just three years later, her third studio album, “Almost Seventeen,” debuted at no 2 in the Japanese charts.

Now 30, Kay is still in pursuit of an international hit and Grammy award. Last year’s album “Shine,” recorded in Tokyo, charted in Japan and created a buzz with critics, while her most recent single, “Sakura,” released during this year’s cherry blossom season, received regular TV and radio airplay.

American record producer and songwriter Jeff Miyahara says Kay is a global ambassador for the music industry.

“She is by far one of the most talented singers as well as talented entertainers in Japan,” says Club Member Miyahara, who produced a track on Kay’s 2008 album, “Color Change!” “Being from a multicultural background, [she] really set the stage for a lot of foreign-born and -raised artists to really have a shot here and be successful. She was a pioneer.”

While Kay has a loyal fan base, she is no stranger to harsh—and sometimes derogatory—online criticism due to her heritage.

“I think [Japan] has changed,” she says, sipping a coffee on a recent Friday afternoon at CHOP Bar. Kay is referring to Ariana Miyamoto, who was crowned 2015’s Miss Universe Japan, becoming the country’s first mixed-race beauty queen. “It’s cool to be mixed,” Kay adds.

Kay’s African-American father met her mother, who was a singer of Korean descent, while he was stationed in Japan with the US Navy. The family lived on a US base in Kanagawa Prefecture.

“A lot of the kids I grew up with were half-Japanese and half-black or half-Japanese and half-white, but we don’t know the difference when we were little, so I thought I was half-Japanese and half-black,” says Kay. “I didn’t know the difference [between] Korean and Japanese.”

She learned first-hand about the discrimination experienced by Japan’s zainichi Koreans when she attended a Japanese summer school. The other students bullied and ostracized her.
Growing up, Kay listened to the likes of Michael and Janet Jackson, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross and attended concerts with her parents.

“It was just natural for me to want to do music,” says Kay. “I don’t remember this, but I was almost 2, and I was in the back seat, and my mom and dad were driving home from somewhere and they said, ‘She’s singing something,’ and [it was] Sheila E’s ‘Hold Me,’ but [I sang] the bass line, not the melody. My dad’s a bassist. …When I am writing songs, I start from the bass line. I love the bass line. That’s the root.”

In the late 1990s, American R&B music, made popular by Destiny’s Child, TLC and Toni Braxton, reached Japan through singers like Hikaru Utada. Kay was heavily influenced by American teen sensation and “queen of urban pop” Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash in 2001. Kay emulated her fashion and music style.

“I came out, and I think I was the first half-black, half-Korean R&B pop singer,” says Kay who was also a keen high school basketball player. “I had a lot of control, actually. Because they would bring me all these demos, but I would be, like,  ‘No, that sounds corny.’ I was, like, 13, 14. I don’t know [why] they listened to me, but they let me do the sound I wanted.”

With success, however, came tighter record label control. Her biggest hit, “Koi no Ochitara,” released in 2005 when Kay was 19, sold more than 300,000 copies. The song was classic bubblegum J-pop, and from then on Kay was pigeonholed as a J-pop artist.

“That was kind of a weird time for me because everybody loves that song, but that wasn’t really the sound I wanted,” she says. “I didn’t like that song, but now I have come to terms with it. I can say it’s a great song and I am thankful for it. Because of that song I am where I am at right now.”

At the peak of her career—and at the urging of her mother—Kay completed a sociology degree at Sophia University, researching the hierarchy of Tokyo’s hostess clubs for her final paper.

Kay never considered another career, and after graduation she jumped back into the fray, teaming up with such artists as Verbal of M-Flo and Jin Akanishi from the boy band Kat-Tun. In 2009, she marked her 10th year in the music industry by releasing the compilation album “Best of Crystal Kay.”

Determined to take her sound to a wider audience, she signed with Universal Records in 2011. “There is nobody that has been able to successfully cross over outside of Japan,” says Kay. “That was a personal [goal]. I wanted to challenge myself if I could do music in the States.”

The following year, she moved to New York City, hoping to sign a record deal and start her career anew. After two years of pounding the pavement, her New York dream failed to materialize.

“The biggest wall I ran into was the lack of self-promotion. I didn’t have that ability to pitch, and everybody in New York is so good at it. Fake it ’til you make it,” she says. “Here, I am in a bubble, [a] consensus-based society. Nobody wants to stand out. …You don’t really need to have that hustle mentality.”

Her time in New York wasn’t a complete bust, though. Kay collaborated on a Grammy-nominated reggae album, allowing her to walk the red carpet in LA. Kay also organized her own acoustic show at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The show sold out in minutes, and organizers asked Kay to perform a second night.

“My goal was to make something happen, but then it didn’t, and I would feel like a failure if I just went back to Japan with nothing,” says Kay. “The show at Rockwood was kind of like the closing event before I headed back to Japan. For the first time, I set up everything on my own. …I think for the first time I was able to forget what anybody thinks of me. I am just here to sing for the people. I was just naked, you know.”

In particular, reviewers praised her rendition of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit “Human Nature.”

Kay returned to Japan at the start of 2015 more resolved than ever to succeed. With a new look, she says fellow musicians have told her that her voice sounds more mature and soulful. She is also rediscovering her Korean roots, noting that her refrigerator is always stocked with homemade kimchi, Korea’s famously spicy staple.

She says she sees more mixed-race performers at the forefront of Japan’s entertainment industry, including members of the popular group J Soul Brothers, with whom Kay collaborated on her last album. Still, Kay reminds people that she is Japanese, born and raised.

“I think that complex I had while here in Japan, that identity crisis, I was able to break it—or New York broke it for me,” she says. “I was able to get confidence and I think I have a stronger sense of who I am.”

Miyahara, who produces other multicultural stars like Chris Hart, says that Kay still has the potential to go global. “Not only is she an amazingly talented entertainer and singer, but she sparkles like the sunlight. She brings radiance into anything she touches,” says Miyahara. “It’s the world stage for her. I have no doubt about that.”

After the photo shoot, Kay, who practices dance moves in the Club’s Studio, takes time to take pictures with every young bowler at the Bowling Center.

Her next release, she says, will be a “nice, uplifting J-pop album” to showcase the “reinvented Crystal Kay.”

“I am looking forward to my 30s.”

Words Nick Narigon
Image Yuuki Ide