EPO -- Sanbanme no Shiawase （三番目の幸せ）

Another Japanese friend of mine was kind enough to give me a taped version of EPO's 10th album, "Poptracks" back in university. The first track of the album is "Sanbanme no Shiawase"(The 3rd Happiness), a happy-go-lucky mid-tempo song about enjoying some solitary time. According to the liner notes in the album, her senpai, Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）, had taken notice of one of the main lines in the song, "Hitori bocchi wa jiyu de ii wa" (ひとりぼっちは自由でいいわ....Being alone is free which is great), and came up a rebuttal song, "Itsuka"(いつか....Someday) which became the 2nd track. It must've been quite the conversation between the two...would've liked to have given my two pennies on the topic of keeping a solitary life (when pennies existed in Canada). In any case, EPO had written and composed this song for a commercial selling a Kao soap product, which is how I actually found out about it.

EPO's 17th single came out in October 1987. At the time I first heard this song, I didn't realize that it was the same singer behind "U, Fu, Fu, Fu"（う、ふ、ふ、ふ）, her 1983 hit that I had heard some years before. And as such, I got interested in EPO for the first time....for the second time. "Sanbanme no Shiawase" is just one of those songs that puts me at ease, and I especially enjoy the jazzy acoustic guitar riff during the bridge.