Free (Mao Abe album)


Free is Mao Abe's first album, released on. It entered the Japanese Oricon album charts at #17, and was in the top 300 for 10 weeks. The album was released in two versions: a regular version and a CD+DVD version only on sale for a limit period of time.
The album was Abe's first physical release, as opposed to the Japanese music industry standard of releasing singles beforehand. All of the songs on this album were written by Abe during 2006-2007 while she was at high school.
When the album was in its final stages, all of the finalised data was lost. The songs had to be rebuilt by Abe and her production team from the original studio recordings.

Promotion

The album was preceded by four digital download singles on iTunes between August and November 2008: all were acoustic demos of Abe songs. Two of these songs, "Hitomishiri no Uta" and "My Baby", were used as album tracks, while the other two were used as singles after the release of the album.
The lead radio single, "'s January ending theme song and the Glico Pocky commercial for special air on the music video channel Space Shower.
Three other songs had tie-ups: "Want You Darling" was used as the theme song of the drama Tetsudō Musume'', "My Baby" was used as the :ja:スキージャム勝山|Ski Jam Katsuyama ski field commercial song, and "Kirei na Uta" was used as the Beauteen hair colour commercial song. This tie-up came after the album's release, hence the song features as the B-side to Abe's "Tsutaetai Koto/I Wanna See You" single, released four months later.

Track listing

CD

All songs written by Mao Abe.

DVD

Personnel

Various charts