Seiko Matsuda -- Ruriiro no Chikyuu （瑠璃色の地球）

I borrowed Seiko Matsuda's（松田聖子）13th album, "Supreme" from a university friend back in the mid-1980s, and I think it was still the time when Seiko-chan was away from the spotlight. And of course at that time, it wasn't nearly as easy to find out about the latest news about Japanese aidoru as it is now so I was wondering whether the Queen Aidoru of the early 80s was going to make her retirement permanent.

The one song that I remembered from that album was the final track, "Ruriiro no Chikyuu" (The Bright Blue Earth). Takashi Matsumoto's（松本隆）lyrics were all about love of humanity and about what a wonderful blue ball we all live on (let's try to remember this now in the era of Brexit, ISIS and potential President Trump). Still, I couldn't quite help thinking that this ballad with all of the heartrending strings and delicate piano could have been the swan song for Seiko-chan.

Shinji Kawahara（川原伸司）was the composer behind the music here although he used his pen name of Natsumi Hirai（平井夏美）for "Ruriiro no Chikyuu". With the grand scale of the melody, I think this would have been one of the final tunes at a Seiko concert with the proverbial darkened stage and one lonely spotlight on Seiko. In keeping with the feeling that this could have been made into the goodbye song for the lass, "Ruriiro no Chikyuu" would have been to Seiko-chan as "Sayonara no Mukou Gawa"（さよならの向う側）was to the premier aidoru of the previous decade, Momoe Yamaguchi（山口百恵）. An epic pop ballad for the young woman who was no longer an aidoru and was on the cusp of motherhood. The audience would have been going through the collective box of tissues like a hot knife through butter.

Incidentally, the above video has Seiko and daughter Sayaka Kanda（神田沙也加）doing a duet version of "Ruriiro no Chikyuu". According to J-Wiki, the ballad had been recorded during Seiko's pregnancy. Sayaka has mentioned that whenever she listens to this particular song, she gets this rather odd feeling. In any case, it is still the song that struck me as being the coda to Seiko's pure aidoru period.