Junichi Inagaki -- P.S. Dakishimetai （P.S.抱きしめたい）

Now that I'm writing this in the 23rd hour of the day, I guess it is time to put on a nighttime ballad before I retire. It's been a while but I'm going to go with a Junichi Inagaki（稲垣潤一）song, "P.S. Dakishimetai" (P.S. I Want to Hold You).

And it's a perfect ballad for the Japanese singer who's up there with Boz Scaggs and Bobby Caldwell in terms of his AOR-ness. The intro and outro of "P.S. Dakishimetai" sound like something bracketing a typical love song by the band Chicago during the 80s. The concert video above has him sounding a tad shaky but otherwise it's a chanson d'amour that I like because I was a Chicago fan back then as well as a fan of a lot of David Foster creations in that same decade.

The song didn't come out as a single but was a new contribution on one of his early BEST albums, "Ballad Selection - P.S. Dakishimetai" from September 1986. Masao Urino（売野雅勇）was responsible for the lyrics while composer Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）created the music. Y'know....I should have figured out it was a Hayashi melody; this could have been covered by Omega Tribe.

I think for folks of a certain age and musical genre, the ballad would be perfect for the bride-and-groom dance at a wedding reception. Sappy? Yes, much...but hey, the Japanese (and I, for that matter) do love their sentimentalism.