Simple and Clean Was Never Just a Song

Simple and Clean is the song I associate with a specific kind of adolescent longing I can’t fully describe—something about late nights with a controller, a world that felt larger than anything I’d built in the real one, and a voice that seemed to understand all of that without quite saying so. Hikaru Utada wrote the Kingdom Hearts theme in 2002 and I have never entirely shaken it. Sanctuary in 2005 pushed it further. Both songs did something unusual: they worked as pop songs completely independently of the games, but they also indexed perfectly to what those games felt like from the inside. That’s rarer than it sounds.

For Kingdom Hearts III, Utada returned with Face My Fears, this time alongside Skrillex—which is either an inspired pairing or a chaotic one, depending on your tolerance for the kind of bass-heavy production Skrillex built his career on. The answer, it turns out, is both. Utada’s voice floats above it in the way it always has, slightly melancholy, slightly hopeful, that specific emotional temperature that belongs entirely to her. The Skrillex elements give it a contemporary edge that doesn’t embarrass itself. It’s not Simple and Clean and it doesn’t try to be. It’s the sound of returning to something after a long time away, which is probably appropriate.

I’ve thought about why the Kingdom Hearts music hits differently than most game soundtracks. Part of it is Utada specifically—she has one of those voices that seems to address you directly, not as a player, not as a consumer, but as a person with a specific interior life. Face My Fears carries that same quality. Whatever age you were when Sora first picked up the Keyblade, the song finds you there.