I've finished off the Yutaka Kimura Speaks file (for now) since Toshiki Kadomatsu(角松敏生)was the final person in "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" to be profiled. So, in the meantime, I'll just be going with a fifth article on any Urban Contemporary tune to finish up the Friday.
As such, why not go with someone a little different? A couple of years ago, I introduced Norwegian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Ole Børud onto the pages of "Kayo Kyoku Plus" because he just impressed me so much with his history and breadth of genres. He's totally at home with both doom metal and West Coast AOR...and I don't mean the west coast of Norway but of the United States and its old creamy soft rock from decades ago.
His 2023 "Find a Way" was just the bee's knees and a welcome and thrumming throwback to 1980s AOR. Plus the fact that he had Bill Champlin, Jay Graydon and Michael Omartian helping him out in the song and the music video firmly implanted in my mind that Børud was the real deal. I still listen to "Find a Way" when I want to fulfill that need for a jolt of happiness and energy.
I also wanted to see what else Børud had done in the AOR part of his discography and so I found this rollicking tune from his 2014 album "Stepping Up". "Maybe" strikes me as his tribute to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, one of the musical legends that informed the overall feeling of "Stepping Up" according to his profile on Wikipedia. But the arrangement also reminds me somewhat of stuff that Bobby Caldwell had done, and so perhaps not surprisingly, I can imagine the Japanese band Sing Like Talking covering "Maybe"...maybe.
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