Chika Ueda -- Hurricane（ハリケーン）

Well, I just wrote about her in my last article and it's been quite a while since I've put pen to paper (or I should really say finger to keyboard) about one of her own songs. So it's time to give some space to Chika Ueda（上田知華）the singer again.

Ueda did compose this opening song "Hurricane" for her first solo album without Karyobin, "Classiest" (August 1984) as she did all of the other tracks. I read on Amazon.jp that Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）was responsible for writing the lyrics for most of the songs on "Classiest" but I couldn't confirm whether "Hurricane" was an Akimoto project (November 30 2022: Actually, I found out that Ueda did both lyrics and melody with Nobuyuki Shimizu「清水信之」 handling the arrangement).

"Hurricane" is an interesting Ueda find since compared to her sweet music days with the string quintet Karyobin in the late 1970s and early 1980s and her torch song ballad "I Will" from 1991, it's a very uptempo contemporary pop tune. I was wondering whether Ueda was channeling some EPO or Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）from the same time period when she created the melody and arrangement for "Hurricane". It doesn't quite reach the same pace as a hurricane but it is pleasantly breezy and summery.