Two months ago I already wrote about Ueto's upcoming 16th single called "Smile for...". Since then it also got already announced that she's planning to bring a new album sometime this year and today they finally released some more details. The new album is going to be called "Happy Magic ~Smile Project~" and will get released on July 15th.

It's been 2 years since the single "Namida no Niji" and her announcement to take a break from her music career. She debuted with the song "Pureness" back in 2002 and since then her music career spawned 15 singles and 4 albums. The reason for the break was to focus more on her acting career, but since then her fans didn't stop flooding her record company and agency with wishes for her to resume singing. Backed by those wishes, Ueto secretly started to work on a very big project.

When speaking of Ueto Aya, there's only one thing that comes to mind first, her smile as bright as the sun. Thus they named it the "Smile Project 2009" and repeatedly started to have meetings since last summer. This year she then started working on her concept album and personally started to ask several musicians to write songs for her.

She got together an amazing bunch of talented songwriters to help her with the album. Tortoise Matsumoto of guitar group Ulfus, Hirose Koumi, RYOUJI of the group Ketsumeishi, Kiroro, Yaita Hitomi, BEGIN and Tokita Shintaro of Sukima Switch are on board. Ueto is said to have received a letter of encouragement for the recording from Hirosue and Yaita even let her to contribute her own thoughts to the lyrics.

The upcoming single is going to be a double A-side single, containing the songs "Smile for...", written and composed by Hirose, as well as "Mou Ichido Dake" written and composed by RYOUJI. The release date for the single got delayed a bit and will now come out on June 24th.

"After a long time I'm finally doing some music again and moreover with the very clear theme, 'Smile!'. The album will completely go a long with the theme. You will be able to listen to it every day and it will boost up your spirit. I myself would give it full 100 points. Please give it 100 points, too. *laughs* "

Recession and hysteria about that new flu, maybe Ueto's voice will really be able to cheer up the Japanese a bit.

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Written by: jyoyu.blogspot.com
Source: Sanspo
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