Yutaka Kimura Speaks: Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）

 

And here we all thought that Yutaka Kimura Speaks ended its time a few weeks ago on March 7th with the 100th entry from "Japanese City Pop Masterpieces 100" finally posted. I certainly had thought so but then going through the source book "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" (2020 edition) in the days since, I realized that there were other parts of it that I could still translate and put up here for at least some more weeks since it was Kimura's writings on some of the singers who were part and parcel of the original City Pop boom back in the 1970s and 1980s.

At the same time, I knew that Mariya Takeuchi's 70th birthday was coming and I just had to provide some sort of commemorative effort on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" today on her special March 20th. Well, I put two and two together and came up with the idea to put up Kimura's thoughts on Takeuchi right here and now (specifically from Page 56 in the book). Any future entries on this new section of Yutaka Kimura Speaks will return back on Friday night. Anyways, happy birthday to Mariya and hope she's having some of that strange peach pie. Kimura's feelings will start from under the video.

There has probably never been a female artist up to now who has been blessed by the surrounding musicians, songwriters and staff as Mariya Takeuchi since she debuted in 1978 with the single “Modotte Oide/Watashi no Jikan”（戻っておいて、私の時間）and the album “Beginning”.

During her time with RCA up to the early 1980s, Takeuchi had been provided with songs by composers including Kazuhiko Kato（加藤和彦）, Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司） and Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎） but also by her old university bandmates Masamichi Sugi（杉真理）and Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）. She’s also been backed up by the band Sentimental City Romance and the best musicians along America’s West Coast. And then in 1982, after getting married to Yamashita and switching to Moon Records, she developed a solid pop world with her husband’s wholehearted support that has been continuing up to now.

In terms of this book, when it comes to the progress of this lady, it feels as if she’s truly taken the best parts, and it was precisely because of this favourable environment that it can be said that she herself was able to gradually develop her hidden talent of songwriting.

As the singing and songwriting housewife, as she has dubbed herself, she’s created songs in her spare time and has released albums at her own pace. After getting married, her stance on her work, when compared to Yumi Matsutoya’s（松任谷由実）emblematic stance as a career woman, is exactly the opposite, but though both of them are Japan’s leading female songwriters, in particular the fact that Mariya Takeuchi's pop music, which is by no means pretentious, has such strong support speaks to the maturity of the Japanese pop music scene in a certain way.

However, Takeuchi is not one to go after well-mannered pop music only, considering that in the 1980s, she’d written a ton of songs on having affairs and adored rustic rock music along the lines of The Band. Her essence lies in human, tasteful music.