Off Course -- Ai wo Tomenaide （愛を止めないで）

Another lovely ballad by Kazumasa Oda （小田和正）and the fellows from Off Course （オフコース）. The meaning of the title is "Don't Stop Loving", and unlike the first Off Course entry, "Aki no Kehai"（秋の気配）, Oda's main character is trying to discourage his love from leaving him. I guess during the two years after "Aki no Kehai"'s release, Oda was putting a bit more positivity into relationships. It must have worked in a way, since the song actually peaked at No. 19 on the Oricon weeklies after being released in January 1979. It was later included in the band's 7th album, "Three and Two"in October of that year; that album reached a peak of No. 2.

Now, as for the name "Off Course". I've always wondered how the band managed to get that name, and I actually did a bit of scouting around the Net for the answer. According to the J-Wiki write-up on the group and an explanation given at Geocities somewhere, future founding members Kazumasa Oda and Yasuhiro Suzuki（鈴木康博） met at a high school sophomore Xmas party in 1964 while performing in a live band; the next year, they plus two others formed their own band for their high school (Seiko Gakuin) culture festival in Yokohama. Skipping ahead a few years to 1967, Oda was studying construction at Tohoku University in Sendai but still maintaining musical ties with Suzuki. After a concert performance, the band finally decided on the odd name "THE OFF? COURSE". The origins of the name come as a tribute to Oda's high school alumni baseball team, the "Of Course"....which was short for "Of course, we will win!"

When they went professional in 1969, the band dropped the "THE", but kept the black dot between the two words until 1977 with the release of "Aki no Kehai" when they got the final form of their name by even dropping the dot. Now you can sleep soundly tonight....or maybe not.