Nagisa no All-Stars -- Nagisa no Merry Boys （渚のMerry Boys）/ Day In Vacation

For all those reading this from the Great White North, Happy Canada Day! Mind you, it's fairly soggy here in Toronto for the 149th birthday of the country but that's fine...we needed some of that precipitation. In any case, it's a good long weekend for us here and in the United States since we've got Canada Day on Friday and on the other side of the weekend, it will be Independence Day in America so I figure we'll have plenty of activity and business crossing the border both ways. Not too busy for me here since I am taking the day off from any translation and I had to pull off a re-installation of my Norton software due to some annoying glitch.

(cover version)

In any case, a few days ago, I wrote a BEST article on the summer band TUBE, and that particular album had its last few tracks devoted to the TUBE-associated project known as Nagisa no All-Stars（渚のオールスターズ）. So I'm just providing a follow-up to that and giving tribute to Canada's first long summer weekend during which there will be mass exodus from the cities.

First off is "Nagisa no Merry Boys" (Merry Boys of the Beach) created by two members of Nagisa no All-Stars, singer-songwriters Tomoko Aran and Tetsuro Oda（亜蘭知子・織田哲郎）as this happy-go-lucky tune done like a Beatles-by-the-beach piece right down to the guitars and even the vocals going "Woooooo". If the Fab Four had ever decided to move to the sands of Shonan after their tour of Asia (which I found out had its share of issues), maybe this could have been one song that John and Paul could have concocted (my tongue is fully buried in my cheek, by the way) although I think by that point in their career, they were probably looking farther afield in their musical ambitions.

(cover version)

Second on this article and the final track on "TUBEst" is "Day In Vacation". Also taken care of by Aran and Oda, this sounds more like the soaring sound of TUBE that I've come to see as summertime on the beaches of Japan. This was the 2nd single by Nagisa no All-Stars released in July 1989 a little over a year following their debut release of "Be My Venus".

Enjoy the weekend!