Ayumi Hamasaki -- mimosa

 

All this time, I've occasionally mentioned the cocktail Orange Mimosa in the blog articles. That came about because I first heard about it on "The Incredibles" years ago. And yet, I'd never sampled the stuff myself, so above is the recipe. I didn't know that it was that easy to make.

Interestingly enough, I heard from a commenter for the Tom Tom Club article stating that Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）put out a new digital single recently. It's been a long time since I've heard from the singer and the last article on her was posted near the end of 2024 by Fireminer. 

At one point, Hamasaki was pretty much the Queen of J-Pop. I was living in Japan at the time and around the early 2000s, it was a rare day that I didn't see her visage in the window of some store, a display in a record shop or on the television screen. Practically every single by her was meant for a Gold stamp and tons of purchases. But then, as we all went further into the 21st century, she did a slow fade from the charts. I knew that she had been suffering from some hearing issues (something that I've been dealing with for some time as well) and I'm hoping that the fact that she's popped up again with a new song, those issues have been rectified.

"mimosa" is her 19th digital single that was released on April 8th and when I heard those first syllables from her, I noticed that her voice had dropped in tone a bit but by the end, it sounded like the Queen was back. With words by Hamasaki, the elegiac melody and arrangement were handled by Kunio Tago（多胡邦夫）and Yuta Nakano（中野雄太）respectively, and there is something about the music which takes me back to those high-flying Hamasaki days. Hamasaki's lyrics are more bittersweet than the usual Orange Mimosa in that they involve having to deal with a lot of sturm und drang in life but staying determinedly on course and not giving up.

The music video is interesting in that it seems to take place in an Ayumi Hamasaki art gallery of sorts with AI helping to animate some of the most famous shots of the singer herself. "mimosa" reached No. 6 on the Oricon Digital Download chart.