Seiko Matsuda -- Hitomi wa Diamond （瞳はダイアモンド）

Just a few days ago, I'd heard about the Yale University discovery of 55 Cancri e, the planet 40 light-years from Earth that is one-third diamond! So, of course, inspiration and dusty memory strike, and here is another Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）hit song, "Hitomi wa Diamond" (Diamond Eyes).

This was another hit penned by Karuho Kureta and Takashi Matsumoto（呉田軽穂・松本隆), and as with the other songs they created for Seiko-chan, there is that relaxing lush feel in the melody. Released in October 1983 (wow, just about 29 years ago!), it was Seiko's 15th single and the 13th straight single to reach No. 1. Despite the late release, "Hitomi wa Diamond"still got up to 46th place in the 1983 rankings and managed to hit 28th place for the 1984 yearly rankings. It was also a track on her 8th album, "Canary", released in December 1983 which also hit No. 1 and ended up as the  7th-ranking album of 1984. Of course, any Seiko BEST collection will have the song.

This was a song that I'd been hearing tons of times at one point. It just seemed to pop up on almost all of the music ranking shows that I'd borrowed from Nippon Video and a number of compilation albums from that period. I also remember when Sony or one of the big electronic companies made its big presentation of the commercial compact disc format, the demo song the representative played was indeed this one.

There was an English-language tribute album to Seiko in the early 90s of which one of the songs was "Diamond Eyes". It was covered by Deniece Williams. For all those American 80s pop fans, she was the singer behind the megahit "Let's Hear It For The Boy" from the original "Footloose". Enjoy!