Listener Guide

Yasu Cub's sophomore album, "my early years, your spiral arms," was released on March 25, 2026 via felicity. Written over more than a decade across Tokyo, small-town Georgia, and the Pacific Northwest, the album's conceptual origins trace back to a college dormitory laundry room, where a friend's astrophysics textbook lay open to a diagram of a spiral-arm galaxy. Struck by the anthropomorphization of the cosmos, the image evoked in singer-songwriter Jacob Oki Ahearn a fleeting sense of one being embraced by the universe. Rooted in slowcore, folk, and shoegaze, the record's narrative arc leans into the liminal, casting an indigo-colored sphere.

This album can be encapsulated, in part, by the phrase, “leaning into liminality”: 

To “lean” is to “incline, deviate or bend,” or “to cast one’s weight to one side” for support, rest, or a better view. It can be a physical and/or an emotional gesture. The word appears 3 times throughout the album.

The word “liminality” comes from the Latin word limen, which means `threshold.’

A threshold is “the part of a doorway that is at the point where one transitions from being on one side of the door to the other,” or “the point at which something has reached its limit and experiences a change, such as the threshold at which a sound becomes audible and ends the previous silence.”

Liminality, then, is the ‘state’ of being in this threshold, of which there are the following types:

• Developmental liminality: the threshold from one life stage to another (i.e. coming-of-age)

• Interpersonal liminality: the threshold between one human being and another

• Spatial liminality: the threshold from one place to another

• Temporal liminality: the threshold from one time to another

• Psychological liminality: the threshold between self-awareness and the subconscious, between wakefulness and sleep

• Metaphysical liminality: the threshold of the threshold, between transience and eternity, self and cosmos, duality and non-duality

Furthermore, there is a Japanese term called “awai” which is similar in meaning to “liminality” but carries a slightly different nuance. The term indicates a state where A and B not only overlap, but they inter-mingle. 

“Awai” can indicate an eventual transition from A to B, but in some usages, the inter-mingling is the point. In this context, A and B don’t have to be mutually exclusive where A must fade for B to emerge, but they can co-exist during/before/after the interactive process.

Thus, the implications of ‘interpersonal liminality’ and ‘metaphysical liminality’ in particular can be deepened by including the nuance of “awai” in the discourse/translation.

Taken altogether, this album can be encapsulated, in part, by the phrase, “leaning into liminality,” or “leaning into awai.”

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The color indigo serves as the visual representation of the album. As an intermediary shade between blue and purple, indigo is also the color of the sky as it transitions from day to night, night to day, where light and dark overlap. 

Just as the first track, “hometown love letter,” sets the stage by placing the protagonist in transit under an indigo sky, between night and day, so too does the closing track, “state of indigo”--this time, between day and night, waves and coast, from “I” to “we”. By doing so, the album’s narrative arc points to, and bends toward, the ‘cyclical’ nature of liminality, and not just its transitoriness.

Equidistant from the first and final track, “en” acts as the album’s pivot point, center, or nucleus, which is gravitationally necessary for a ‘cyclical’ motion to occur.

In Japanese, there are two main ways to write “en”: 円 (“circle,” “currency”) or 縁 (“fate,” “bond”). By ambiguously keeping the song title in English, the meanings of both kanji can be retained and referred to within the song’s universe.

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One additional detail in the recording process that is now embedded in the album’s meaning and emergence is the occurrence of the lunar eclipse on March 13-14, 2025. 

Specifically, it happened while I was recording the lead electric guitar part for “sea glow” (8th track). After the take, I walked into the mixing room, and Rory (producer) said that his mom called while I was recording, and there is a lunar eclipse outside. We rushed out into the crisp air to witness that ultimate expression of cosmic liminality. 

Post-eclipse, the moon was the brightest I’d ever seen (the photo of which is now embedded in both the album art and artist photo). 

The following morning, we wrote/recorded “buffalo, ny” (6th track), as though it was transmitted the night before. 

For me, meaning-making happens retrospectively rather than premeditatively, by connecting the dots after the creation process. Now, I view “buffalo, ny” as an ancestral flashback to my late grandfather, on my Irish-American side. He retired in upstate New York, and we visited every Christmas when I was growing up. There was also a lake nearby (a photo of which is embedded in the album art itself). For some reason, the song evokes an almost photographic feeling in me of being back there. I can almost feel his presence in the song. 

Connected by the timeline of the lunar eclipse is also “sea glow,” which is another ancestral flashback, this time to my grandmother on my Japanese side. Written from her perspective in the late 1950's, riding a ferry with my grandfather across the Pacific Ocean and the International Dateline (another threshold), en route from Yokohama to Seattle (since this album was made between Tokyo and Seattle, another circle is formed). My grandfather would then go on to study theology with Reinhold Niebuhr in New York City where my mother was born, connecting to my own existence. 

Written in dedication to my grandmother, “sea glow” paints a scene that highlights the dignity and humanity of the immigrant experience, “betwixt and between” two worlds, from the perspective of a mother, heading into the unknown, guided by a faith.

As a person of mixed heritage between Japan and the United States, “liminality” has been an inherent and natural state of being and upbringing. In one sense, “liminality” can bring with it inner- and outer- friction due to its location between two worlds. However, there can also be depth, beauty, and mystery within it. 

Maybe you’ve felt it, too.
Within your own life. 

This album is an invitation.
To lean into it.   

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Yasu Cub
Jacob Oki Ahearn