Akina Nakamori -- Second Love （セカンド・ラブ）

I think I've been pretty good these past 4 years about covering the Japanese pop songs I've enjoyed over the past 35 years. However, considering the large number of tunes that have managed to get onto the blog since early 2012, I am bound to make a few rare omissions. Akina Nakamori's（中森明菜）"Second Love" is one of them.

Covering so many of her songs, I had assumed that "Second Love" was already up somewhere on the blog perhaps not as its own article but in the very first of the BEST articles that I concocted a couple of years ago. After taking a look at that one, I came to the discovery that I laid an egg. Well, as they say, when you get an egg, you can make a small omelet.

What makes my omission rather shocking to me at least is that "Second Love" was a song that I heard tons of times at Kuri, my old karaoke haunt in downtown Toronto during my university days. I would say that I heard the karaoke version of it more than I did the original version by Akina herself. Hearing this absolutely adorable and sappy love ballad created by Etsuko and Takao Kisugi（ 来生えつこ・来生たかお）with the singer pulling out the high tones in her voice, I had assumed for the longest time that this was her 2nd single following the just-as-cute "Slow Motion" (スローモーション）from 1982. But as it turned out, it was her 3rd single, between the tough chick tunes of "Shojo A"（少女Ａ）and "Ni-bun no Ichi no Shinwa"（1/2の神話）. Apparently for the early part of her career, she was going AC-DC with her vocals.

As I mentioned in one of my early articles for Akina, I started listening to her when she had already attained superstar status so it was all about the funky and snazzy music accompanying her husky vocals by that point in the mid-80s. So it was with some surprise to finally hear the original version of "Second Love" when she still sounded truly like an early 80s aidoru. There was quite the "Awww" factor when I heard it.

"Second Love" was released in November 1982. It hit No. 1 on Oricon; in fact, it had an extended stay at the top spot a couple of times from November to December, and then in 1983 for a few weeks in January for a total of 6 weeks. That long stay helped it to attain the No. 8 ranking for 1983. It also earned a Grand Prize for Takao Kisugi at the Japan Composers' Awards in that same year. Furthermore, Kisugi did his own classy cover.

Another omission...cannot believe there is yet to be any Nana Mizuki（水樹奈々）article on the blog. Will have to rectify that sometime soon but in the meantime, here is her cover of "Second Love".