Selfish -- Jiyu ni Natte （自由になって）

Heck of a name for a band. I found out about this 90s trio called Selfish while listening to one of the discs (Dream, to be exact) from the "Light Mellow" series of J-AOR/City Pop. They made their first big splash when they won the Grand Prix at the Yamaha-sponsored Band Explosion in 1991 and then released their debut album in 1993, "Colors of Love".

There isn't a lot of information available about Selfish online except that the trio comes from Fukuoka and it stands out for its combination of vocalist Hiroyuki Imura（井村裕之）, drummer Yukihiro Matsumoto（松本幸裕）and trumpeter Naoki Otsubo（大坪直樹）with guest musicians to round out the performances. Now, the fellow to the very right of the cover for "Colors of Love" is Imura, and he's got quite the pipes for this one track I heard on that "Light Mellow" CD, "Jiyu ni Natte" (Be Free) which was originally from that debut album. I especially liked the part where he went "Oh, oh, oh, oh..." in the main part of the song along with that intro with the synths. Otsubo wrote and composed the song.

https://music.apple.com/jp/album/%E8%87%AA%E7%94%B1%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AA%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A6/1246032420?i=1246032429

(excerpt only)

Selfish's genres are AOR and urban contemporary which are just up my alley. It's nice to hear another band along the lines of Sing Like Talking. Apparently, they released just two albums before breaking up for a while but according to the liner notes inside my "Light Mellow" CD, Selfish got back together in the early 2010s to perform live. Wouldn't mind if I could get my hands on "Colors of Love" someday.

For those folks who might be interested in how City Pop fared in the 1990s, I found some of the information about Selfish on this amazing blog called "90-Nendai City Pop Kirokubo"（90年代シティーポップ記録簿...90s City Pop Record）. Also from that same "Light Mellow" CD I found "Jiyu ni Natte", there is Toko Furuuchi's（古内東子）smooth-as-silk "Somewhere in Tokyo" which I have already written about.