Precious (Cubic U album)

Precious is the debut English album by Cubic U (Hikaru Utada's stage name before her debut in Japan), which was recorded at Sony Music Studios in New York in 1996. The album was never released commercially in the US, due to internal problems with the label EMI. It was only available to music industry insiders. The album was released in Japan on January 28, 1998; the album failed to chart on the Oricon weekly charts. After the huge success of Utada's First Love, the album was re-released on March 31, 1999 and peaked at #2 on the Oricon charts with 702,060 copies sold.

Track listing

All tracks are written by Utada Hikaru and Charlene Harrison, except for tracks 3, 5, 7 and 12 written by Utada, Harrison and Michael C. Warner and track 9 written by Utada and Warner. "Close to You" is a cover version of the Burt Bacharach–Hal David composition "(They Long to Be) Close to You" made famous by the Carpenters..

No.	Title	Length
1.	"My Little Lover Boy"	4:28
2.	"Lullaby"	4:38
3.	"How Ya Doin'"	3:05
4.	"I Don't Love You"	4:51
5.	"Here and There and Back Again" (on promo copies only)	4:47
6.	"Promise"	5:24
7.	"Ticket 4 Two"	5:23
8.	"Take a Little While"	3:52
9.	"100 Reasons Why"	4:31
10.	"Work Things Out"	4:31
11.	"Close to You"	4:39
12.	"Precious Love"	5:20
13.	"How Ya Doin' (Rap Version)" (bonus track)	3:46

Note: Several promo copies of the album have the track "Here and There and Back Again" as track 5. This was not released physically.

Release history

Country	Date	Version	Label
Japan	January 28, 1998	Original	Toshiba-EMI
Japan	March 31, 1999	Re-release	Toshiba-EMI

Singles

Date	Title	Peak position	Weeks	Sales
January 28, 1997	"Close to You"	---	---	---

Charts

Precious - Oricon Sales Chart (Japan)

Release	Chart	Peak Position	Sales Total	Chart Run
March 31, 1999 (Re-release)	Oricon Daily Albums Chart
	Oricon Weekly Albums Chart	2	702,060	17 weeks
	Oricon Yearly Albums Chart	35	702,060