Ringo Sheena - Singing and Songwriting Style

Singing and Songwriting Style

Sheena is an accomplished musician and songwriter who writes music spanning numerous genres. She is well known for her eccentricity, rolling her "r"s and creating promotional music videos with striking visuals.

She admired Eddi Reader's voice, but felt her own voice was not as clear and sounded hoarse. She admired Janis Ian's singing and wrote "Seventeen" in tribute to Ian's "At Seventeen". She later covered "Love Is Blind". She listens to many genres of music. At the time of her debut, she has ten closely written pages of lists of her favorite musicians. They included various genres such as classical music, Japanese and American popular music from the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary rock, and the local band Fukuoka.

She mainly plays rhythm guitar, but she plays other musical instruments. During live shows she sometimes plays the piano and occasionally plays the bass guitar. While recording, she sometimes plays piano and drums, and occasionally uses uncommon musical instruments such as a melodica and a samisen.

Sheena's lyrics often contain complex and archaic language. Printed lyrics in her liner notes regularly feature kanji that are not in common use.

Sheena's songwriting style steadily became more complex over the course of her solo career, incorporating a wider variety of instruments and more elaborate production with each album. Sheena's influence in songwriting is still dominant in Tokyo Jihen, and the arrangements have been stripped down to a more standard rock and roll style, highlighting the roles of the individual players in the band.