Great song Phil, I'm enjoying listening to it.

I saw the comments on youtube about the mixing - it sounds pretty good to me actually. There are definitely vocal parts that you put way back in the mix but I just figured it was intentional artistic choices. The vocals definitely don't sound too dry or too loud to me.

Also about how you said it was squashed, I heard that too but that will always be tough for busy arrangements, trying to self-master to get the volume level loud enough, and when you don't have very expensive fancy equipment to compress more transparently...I experienced the exact combo myself leading my older originals to sound squashed and that I think you ran into to an extent here. But it takes a lot of mixing/mastering skill to avoid the "squashed" or smeary effect with two or three of those variables happening so I find it's best to really capitalize on facing those obstacles rather than avoiding them while practicing mixing and mastering because they'll really push you to improve.

I wouldn't touch this version though, as you know improvement takes time so you can always just let this be what it is and wait for the next round of songs which is what 99% of our favorite artists do. Or you wait for a grand motivation to redo them or something.

One idea I've been thinking about is that even when people do redo their music for better quality, they tend to improve some things but neglect others sometimes even creating new problems. So one of my ideas for my music is, finish it at a 90% quality to my taste, then strategically run it by certain people first, say, a guitarist, bassist, vocalist, pianist, mixing engineer, mastering engineer, someone in the music business, a non-musician with a good overall ear...try to get an opinion from each of "do you hear anything that really should be redone better" and weigh them in with my own opinions and then i can accurately prioritize what should really be improved and what is okay to leave imperfect.

Your song sounds great though. To my ear, any issues I heard would just be small details of the songwriting/arrangement that popped out at me as strange but they would only be from the standpoint of if you were trying to go for a more "mainstream" sound and even at that I have to remember you're in Japan where the music ideals could be quite different.

The big overall win here though is that you are being different than what everyone has done 50000 billion times before while still maintaining a really catchy chorus and a danceable groove so that's a cool combo. Great music

By the way, a good idea for you might be to post the lyrics for your original songs at some point. At the most extreme you could post a lyric video but at the bare minimum you just wanna have it up somewhere if some passionate fan wants to read it.

cool. never saw that article before