Singer Hikaru Utada announces 'artistic activity' break

Singer-songwriter Hikaru Utada is going from exodus to hiatus.

According to a message on her homepage from Aug. 9, Hikki (as she as known to her army of fans worldwide) has wrote that following the release of this fall’s Utada Hikaru Single Collection Vol. 2 album, she will take time off from her musical career effective next year.

The message finds the musician in a reflective mood, recalling the music video from her single “Automatic,” released 12 years ago when the singer was just 15 years old. She commented that since then, “part of my growth has stopped…as a person.” Hikki now intends to focus on “human activity” over “artistic activity” in the next year for an indeterminate period.

The New York City-born songstress, who writes and performs all of her music, mostly in collaboration with father/producer/manager Teruzane Utada, has notched three of Japan’s top ten bestselling albums, including the top spot with her official Japanese debut, 1999’s First Love. Altogether, she has sold an estimated 50 million albums worldwide. In 2002, she married Kazuaki Kiriya, a photographer and film director who was 15 years her senior. The couple divorced four and half years later, citing personal changes.

Completely bilingual in both Japanese and English, the 27-year-old has focused mainly on her career on Japan, but dipped a toe in the American waters occasionally. In 2001, she enrolled for a short-lived stint at Columbia University, and in 2004 teamed up with American Grammy-winning producer Timbaland for Exodus, an English language crossover album. While the disc became the biggest-selling foreign language effort in Japanese history, sales in the U.S. stalled at 55,000 units. A follow-up, 2009’s This is the One, moved even less, despite increased promotion and the singer’s first-ever U.S. tour, which wrapped in New York earlier this year.

Hikki is perhaps best known in the U.S. for her song “Simple and Clean,” which she translated herself into English for the Square Enix video game Kingdom Hearts in 2002.

Visit Hikki online at www.emimusic.jp/hikki and www.utada.com. Read a 2009 interview this writer conducted with her at http://jetwit.com/wordpress/2009/06/08/jq-interview-with-hikaru-utada-by-justin-tedaldi/.

How do you feel about Hikki’s decision? Post a comment below.

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