Akira Fuse -- Koi（恋）

 

Akira Fuse（布施明）appeared on "Uta Con"（うたコン）today. He usually comes onto the show about two or three times a year, by my reckoning and he looks mighty fine for a 76-year-old. In fact, the hosts acknowledged the fact that Fuse is celebrating his 60th anniversary in show business.

As I mentioned long ago in one of my early articles on Fuse, the man is one of a handful of singers that has that booming voice which can really project. I remember one commenter who complained that Fuse was frankly just booming all of his vocals off the walls in recent appearances which annoyed the heck out of him. To be honest, I once wondered if I ever had the opportunity to meet the singer, would he end up greeting me through two walls and the outer shell of the house? 😏

But in any case, one song that popped up in the short montage of his work was his March 1967 single "Koi" (Love). He was still technically a teenager at 19 in Japan when he sang of the wide spectrum of emotions that bursts out when exposed to love so I'm not sure whether he had already been fully aware of its implications and consequences. But getting out of that complicated circumstance, "Koi" has a tango-esque arrangement thanks to Masaaki Hirao's（平尾昌晃）melody; he also took care of the lyrics with Tetsu Mizushima（水島哲）.

It's interesting comparing the original recording with his later renditions of "Koi". Fuse was downright hesitant and halting with his delivery on the record but later on, it seems that experience and confidence brought some of the boom into his future performances. However even so, he's not quite as forceful as he is with some of his other hits.

Oricon was still not up and running when "Koi" had its own success, but it sold 700,000 records and Fuse received his first invitation onto the Kohaku Utagassen at the end of 1967 to perform this one.