How Sheena Ringo Made Me Care About Football

Kofukuron, Honnō, Tsumi to Batsu—three tracks that made me feel like I’d finally found music that understood something I couldn’t name. Sheena Ringo has that quality. She builds songs that feel simultaneously theatrical and intimate, melodramatic and cold, and somehow completely her own. So when the 2014 World Cup came around and I found out she’d written the official anthem for Japan’s national team, I felt something almost embarrassingly warm about it.

The song is called Nippon—Japanese for Japan, no metaphor, no distance—and it really goes off. It has the scale a stadium anthem demands without sacrificing whatever makes Ringo untranslatable. I don’t know how she pulls that off. Most artists handed a nationalistic sports brief either phone it in or lose themselves entirely in the assignment. She did neither.

My allegiances in football are eccentric by most standards. I’ve rooted for Japan since long before I had a good reason to, and now I have the best one: the soundtrack. There’s a particular pleasure in seeing an artist you love given a completely different assignment—bigger, louder, more populist—and watching them just handle it. Nippon earns the word epic without borrowing it from anyone else.