Aiko Kayo -- Hold on to love

I don’t remember how, but, recently, I was looking for some J-Pop songs on YouTube and, accidentally, found a song by Aiko Kayo (嘉陽愛子), an aidoru singer who was active mainly during the mid-00s singing anime/game themes.

After listening to her not-very-big discography, I was able to select my favourite songs from her, and one of them is “Hold on to love”, a single she released in January 2006.

“Hold on to love”, unlike Aiko’s most popular songs, is not a hyper upbeat song, but rather a mid-tempo romantic tune. I don’t really know why, but the melody caught me off guard with a very subtle sadness during the chorus... and although I’m not a person in love right now, we all need a cheesy love song sometimes. About Aiko’s singing, she’s just very cute. Not a proper singer, of course, but I can feel emotion in her singing, and that’s rare in my case.

A fun fact about Aiko Kayo is that she auditioned for Morning Musume (モーニング娘。) in 2001’s “Love Audition 21”, earning the 9th spot. According to generasia, “she was able to make it to the final nine”, although, in the end, she was not chosen. A couple of years after, though, she signed a record deal with avex trax and started her solo career as an aidoru pop singer connected to the otaku world. In the end, even though Aiko didn’t enter Hello! Project, I feel like she’s one of Tsunku’s (つんく) soloists, like Aya Matsuura (松浦亜弥) or Miki Fujimoto (藤本美貴), for example. Maybe because they were all contemporaries.

“Hold on to love” reached #72 on the Oricon charts. The song was used in the “Emil Chronicle Online” (エミル・クロニクル・オンライン) game and was later included in Aiko’s first album, “Dolce”, which was released in March 2006. Lyrics were written by Kenn Kato, while music and arrangement were done by Greenwich Fields.

Source: generasia.com