Behind the Mask" was a track from Yellow Magic Orchestra's 1979 album Solid State Survivor, with English lyrics by Chris Mosdell sung by Ryuichi Sakamoto using a vocoder. Sakamoto already had the melody line when he asked poet and lyricist Mosdell to write lyrics, which he based on the imagery of a Japanese traditional Noh mask, combined with a poem by Irish poet W.B. Yeats called, "The Mask."
Mosdell has said of the lyrics that "I was talking about a very impersonal, socially controlled society, a future technological era, and the mask represented that immobile, unemotional state.[2]"
It was the first studio recording of this song, although the band had originally produced it as an instrumental in 1978, when the song first appeared in a Seiko quartz wristwatch commercial[1] and was then played live in concert that same year. In 1980, the song was released as a single in the UK with the B-side as "Yellow Magic (Tong Poo)",[3] and it was included in the US and European versions of the band's next studio album x∞Multiplies that same year.[4]
Following the break-up of Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1983, the band's former keyboardist and the writer of the song, Ryuichi Sakamoto, re-recorded it in 1987 with Michael Jackson's additional lyrics and lead vocals by Bernard Fowler. A similar arrangement was performed (with Fowler) in Sakamoto's "Media Bahn Live" tour the previous year. A CD single with 3 tracks [5] and a CD maxi with 6 tracks entitled "Behind the Mask +3" were released.[6][7