Not quite sure whether Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）was being assaulted by Big Bird on his cover for his June 1994 album, "Sweet Revenge", but it's a cover that I've seen time and again over the years whenever I passed through one of the major CD shops.
And last night, I decided to try one of the tracks from the album on YouTube, "Anna". I've known The Professor's solo works mostly via "energy flow" and the theme song from "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", but after listening to "Anna", I think I can add this into the "Memories of Ryuichi" file, too. I also knew that he had a flair for bossa nova from his song for Miki Imai（今井美樹）, "Martinique no Kaifu"（Martiniqueの海風）, but "Anna" just brings back some old-time romantic impressions from the 1960s. In fact, I would have loved to have met this Anna who apparently so inspired Sakamoto. As it so happens, the song was named after the wife of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the father of bossa nova himself.
Interesting thing I found out in the Japanese write-up for "Anna" on J-Wiki. Sakamoto had supposedly written it for NOKKO of Rebecca to sing but the circumstances made that impossible. I would've been intrigued to see how that would have come out.
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