It was a nice start to the weekend with a sunny day and comfortable temperatures. Met up with a couple of friends that I hadn't seen since late April for lunch at Touhenboku Ramen near Yonge & Eglinton so we were able to have a good talk on movies and the like. It's pretty difficult now for the large circle of friends from university days to get together due to various reasons such as family obligations and the inevitable drifting away. So for me, it's been about getting together occasionally with small groups; in my case, that would be one to two other people at a time. And to be honest, that sort of get-together is more my speed now...a trio of good friends talking it up for a couple of hours over lunch or dinner.
I guess this would be a nice segue for Junko Yagami's（八神純子）"Be My Best Friend". Actually, though, this is a song so nice, I have placed it twice in the blog including this time. I first mentioned it when it was first introduced in the very first BEST album for Yagami, "Junko The Best" from 1980.
Commenter T-cat and I were talking about the lovely music that songwriter Etsuko Yamakawa（山川恵津子）was coming up with during the 1980s so I was trying to track another song by the lady down when I met up with "Be My Best Friend" again. Yup, Yamakawa was responsible for words and music for this oh-so-pleasant song for Yagami about trying to get back up and out again after the loss of a romantic relationship. If there is one singer who can bring together Latin and pop splendidly, it would be Yagami.
Will really have to think about doing that Creator article on Yamakawa now.
Thank you so much for commenting on so many of Junko's songs, this website is a goldmine of old-timey j-pop recommendations! This song is actually my favorite of hers, but I wish there were at least lyrics of it somewhere, I could never make out what that "rikapa~" in the chorus means.
ReplyDeleteHello there. No problems here...I'm a huge fan of hers as well. As for the chorus, I think Junko is singing "Gimme little time to get recover (rikapa)". If I were her English teacher at the time, I probably would be rapping her knuckles for the grammatical error but dang, it's a wonderful song!
DeleteOh, that makes a lot of sense, thank you! I finally know what that means, after so long... Junko's English seems almost perfect in other songs, so I wouldn't have guessed something like that. Yes, it's a truly great song!
Delete