Cover №01 · Anime · Mar 2026
Merry-Go-Round of Life
Hisaishi · Howl's Moving Castle — figured out, slowly.
YouTube · The cover
How I heard this
Hisaishi writes waltzes the way Ravel did — the bass line is as much of a melody as the top voice.
When I tried to figure this one out I kept losing the second bar, because the harmony moves on a beat I wasn’t expecting. The metric displacement is the whole character of the piece. Hear the one inside the waltz, not the waltz itself.
The progression, in prose
The A-section loop is i – v – ♭VI – ♭III – iv – i – V⁷ – i in F minor, with the ♭VI functioning almost like a second tonic — the tune keeps landing there and treating it as home before the V⁷ pulls it back. The 3/4 meter is real but the phrase lengths cross the barline constantly.