Noeri Kojima -- One Track Mind

I was doing a bit of blog maintenance today such as replacing any "dead" videos. Since some of the powers-that-be in the Japanese music industry rather frown on any of their products getting too much free publicity on YouTube, they tend to have some very nicely done presentations surrounding the songs taken down....which means "dead video" space on my blog. There was one such space in my article for Makoto Matsushita's（松下誠） "First Light" album today and so I had to go searching for a replacement which took me to this site . It had a lot of City Pop/R&B music by Japanese artists that I had never come across before, aside from Matsushita....a bit of a small treasure trove, actually.

The first person I came across there was Noeri Kojima（小島乃江里）. I had never heard of her but apparently she performed the theme song "On The Wing" for the TV anime series, "Lensman". I just listened to it on YouTube, and it has that Bonnie Tyler "Holding Out For A Hero" vibe. However, that wasn't the song I heard on the Tudou site. Instead it was "One Track Mind", a cool urban tune with a bit of Lionel Richie nuance in there. The video above has Noeri Kojima for some reason, but I think the face shown at Tudou and the one on Kojima's own site are one and the same. In any case, "One Track Mind" sounds great and it seems like the singer-songwriter was going down the same road that artists like Reimy（麗美）and Junko Yagami（八神純子）were following in the late 1980s.

There's not much written of her profile on her own site (nothing on J-Wiki), except that she has released just 3 singles, a mini-album and a full album. In 1986, she started a new career as a vocal trainer and is running the Eri Vocal School. According to her site, she has been training more than 200 singers such as Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘） and Mariko Ide（井出麻里子）, and has helped out in terms of chorus arrangement for Anri（杏里）, Masayuki Suzuki（鈴木雅之） and the aforementioned Yagami.

For contrast, here is "On The Wing".

Anyways, it just goes to show that there is a lot of music for us to dig through from the old days.