Tamio Okuda -- Eajuu ★ Rider （イージュー★ライダー）

I haven't heard this one by Tamio Okuda （奥田民生）in a long time, and just tonight there was an NHK documentary on stargazing which had "Eajuu ★ Rider" as the ending theme.

Noticing that the Golden Week holidays are on the verge of happening in Japan, I thought this would be just the song. Unfortunately, my student in the tony Den'en-Chofu district of Tokyo told me last Saturday that the Week this year would be somewhat chintzy in length since due to timing, it's gonna be split in half. Still, a holiday is a holiday. And "Eajuu ★ Rider" has that thrilling on-the-road-again feeling to it.

Okuda was launching Ami and Yumi of PUFFY onto their long career when he released this, his 6th single as a solo artist in June 1996. He wrote and composed one of his most beloved songs as a rolling travelogue.... riding on that motorcycle over the hills of the countryside without a care in the world. As for the derivation of the title, it comes from the title of that famed counterculture movie with Jack Nicholson, "Easy Rider" and E10 (read in Japanese as "E-juu"), supposedly a jargon word meaning 30 (I'm assuming it's musical jargon) ...and the singer was indeed 30 years old when it was released.

The song peaked at No. 4 on Oricon and became the 48th-ranked entry on the annual charts. Not surprisingly, it was also used as the tie-up tune for a Nissan car commercial at the time. It does make one wanna hit the road just to put the song into the car stereo.