Eri Hiramatsu -- Ano Hi no Wasuremono（あの日の忘れ物）

It's been a few years since I put up an Eri Hiramatsu（平松愛理）article so welcome back to the blog!

Although this was of course not true across the board, when I think of female Japanese singers during the early 1990s, I still usually think of bands such as Princess Princess and solo artists such as ZARD who kinda traipsed their way musically on the border between pop and rock. But then comes Hiramatsu, and when I think of her, there are images and sounds of a sweet old-fashioned pop but nothing necessarily too languid. My last article on her, for example, "Mou Waraushikanai" (もう笑うしかない) was pretty peppy.

That particular song was not only her 10th single but also the lead track on her 5th album "Erhythm" from September 1992. And so is this non-single track, "Ano Hi no Wasuremono" (What I Forgot On That Day) which was written and composed by Hiramatsu. This is a slightly contemplative ballad about a woman's remembrances of a past romance and then realizing that she'd forgotten to ask her now-past tense paramour why he had fallen for her in the first place. Looks like they had some really good times.

Why I like "Ano Hi no Wasuremono" is the way that the singer and arranger Nobuyuki Shimizu（清水信之）made the song sound slightly like something swingy and jazzy from the 1960s although it is a 90s concoction. If Audrey Hepburn made singing more of a priority during that time, I would imagine that she would have tried "Ano Hi no Wasuremono" on for size. The voices are completely different, but for some odd reason, I could even imagine Corinne Drewery from Swing Out Sister also giving this a go.