Miki Ishioka -- My Life（マイ・ライフ）

I discovered this song during one of my usual sojourns through YouTube a number of months ago but only found the opportunity to put it up today. This is Miki Ishioka's（石岡美紀）"My Life".

Writing the blog all these years, I've been realizing some of the trends that were happening over the decades with one of them being the sophisticated pop from female singers and songwriters in the late 1980s going into the early 1990s. Perhaps with "My Life", I've come to the realization that the first half of the 1990s was a period of heartwarming pop ballads for some of these singer-songwriters. I think that would make for a nice little refresher genre considering that the time was also filled with a lot of guitar pop-rock bands and the advent of the Komuro Boom.

"My Life" was the final song for what would be Ishioka's final album to date, "In My Life" from June 1995. Ishioka wrote the lyrics and Etsuko Yamakawa（山川恵津子）came up with the music which would also hint at some of the pop ballads from America of the 1980s. It was Yamakawa's work that got me to listen to this one a lot more since Ishioka doesn't have the strongest vocals here.

As for Ishioka, the Tokyo-born singer and songwriter got into music and dance at an early age, and during her elementary school years, she was drawn to the music of Pink Lady（ピンク・レディー）and Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）. However, on watching the American comedy "The Monkees" (as I did), she also became interested in Western music, and became impressed with The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt.

Ishioka released 9 singles, 5 albums and 2 mini-albums in the 1990s. The singer also became a flamenco dancer, and in fact, she has opened her own flamenco school in Tokyo.