Tatsuro Yamashita -- Love Talkin' (Honey It's You)

The weekend is almost here and later on tonight I will be meeting up with some of the guys for a Peking Duck dinner. Such a dinner would practically require proof of ownership of a credit card in Yokohama's Chinatown but over here, it isn't too bad.

In any case, before I take off, I wanted to place at least one Friday article. So why not another Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）City Pop classic from his "For You" album (1982)? At this rate, I don't think I will need to do an album article since I've pretty much covered almost every track on "For You" over the past 5 years such as "Amaku Kiken na Kaori"（あまく危険な香り）and "Loveland, Island".

This track is "Love Talkin' (Honey It's You)" which I had assumed I already covered but discovered such wasn't the case. Tats, of course, took care of the bouncy and lightly funky melody but a frequent collaborator helped out again in the form of Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）. And not surprisingly, she was helping out with the backing vocals, too.

As for the hooky music, according to J-Wiki's article on "For You", Yamashita, drummer Jun Aoyama（青山純）and bassist Kouki Ito（伊藤広規）went into a practice studio one day and hammered out the basic rhythm and let things expand naturally from there. Considering some of the other wonderful songs that Yamashita has created over the decades, I would have loved to have been the fly on the wall in that studio.

"For You" hit No. 1 on Oricon after its release in January 1982 and stayed at the top for 3 consecutive weeks for much of February.