Rather ironic...I was writing about how Jaws the Tape Recorder managed to make a meal out of Akina Nakamori's（中森明菜）"Crimson" tape last week and yet it left my 3-penny Canadian Tire audio tape all alone. I wonder what Canadian Tire put into those things. On the above tape, there were a couple of episodes of "Sounds of Japan", the old radio show on CHIN-FM.
(excerpt only)
And one of the songs on one of the episodes happened to be this sunny and somewhat urgent-sounding track from Hiromi Iwasaki's（岩崎宏美）"Salvia"（緋衣草）album (her 10th) from July 1981 (the month that I had actually arrived in Tokyo for my graduation trip...if I had only known then what I know now).
"Hitotsu Mae no Natsu" (The Summer Before) starts off with an intro that sounds like something Yuming (ユーミン) would have made at the same time but when the light and breezy vocals come in, it is indeed a Hiromi Iwasaki song. In fact, although it is an early 80s song with a hint of City Pop, there is something about it which reminds me of her very early days in the mid 70s. Perhaps it might be her higher vocals here.
Written by singer-songwriter Emiko Shiratori（白鳥英美子）of Toi Et Moi（トワ・エ・モワ）fame and composed by Sumio Shiratori（白鳥澄夫）, the singer cheerfully sings about heading back down to the beach and reminiscing about a past romance from 12 months previously. The album "Salvia" made it up to No. 21 on the charts and although it's been labeled as an aidoru effort, I can't really say that Iwasaki was an aidoru by that point; she pretty much graduated into a full-fledged pop singer by the new decade in my eyes.
Ah, just as a friendly note here. The uploader, Sagittarius宏美04, for this video has a large number of Hiromi Iwasaki songs on his/her YouTube channel but has limited "operating hours". So he/she actually closes the channel at certain times which means that there will be times you won't be able to access the video.
You can also listen to excerpts from the album at CD Japan.
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