Shoko Suzuki -- Sweet Thing

Now here's a song that lives up to its title. Whenever I listen to this gracefully-written piece by the singer-songwriter Shoko Suzuki (鈴木祥子), I get an urge to embrace any nearest possible object -- in 8 chances out of 10, it ends up being my cat. It starts off slow and simple with just the piano, strings, and Shoko's soft vocals, then steadily builds up into a power ballad complete with soaring notes and heroic guitar solo. Its melody has the word "classic" written all over it, though the single didn't fare well on the charts to garner that status.

"Sweet Thing" was Shoko's 8th single, released on December 1, 1991, and was included on her studio album Hourglass, which hit the shelves on the same day. It was written and composed by Shoko and arranged by Hiroaki Sugawara (菅原弘明), whom she would marry by the end of the year. From her debut in 1988 and before this album, her work was largely supervised by external producers, but with Hourglass, she finally gained some independence in the recording process. Judging by Shoko's skill with multiple instruments, including piano, electric and acoustic guitar, bass, and drums (she plays piano and drums on "Sweet Thing"), and her musical influences, including but not limited to Todd Rundgren, The Beatles, James Taylor, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, and Cheap Trick, I can tell that right from the start she was dedicated to handling music on her own terms. She eventually reached that goal when she released an entirely self-performed album Love, painful love in 2000 and made a switch to an indies label soon after. She also wrote songs on the side for a number of other artists such as Kyoko Koizumi, Maaya Sakamoto, Takui Nakajima, and Puffy (in collaboration with Tamio Okuda on their album Fever*Fever).

All that information, by the way, comes from the wonderful English-language fansite Suzuki no Snapshots. Kudos to Pooch for working hard to provide those from outside of Japan with everything you need to know about this artist.