Kyosuke Kusunoki -- Nagisa ni te ~ Close To You（渚にて）

Well, I decided that it was time for another spending binge on the music that I love, and one of the albums that I had been aiming for was Kyosuke Kusunoki's（楠木恭介）"Just Tonight" (1985). From listening to the soulful ballad "Come To Me Again" and writing about it, I was hooked on that 80s AOR along with Kusunoki feeling like the second coming of Bobby Caldwell and Fujimaru Yoshino（吉野藤丸）.

(21:00)

Alas, although the album is indeed available at Tower Records, it's currently only in LP format and costs over $40 Canadian. It's not only too rich for my blood, but frankly I think that I (and probably Tower as well) would be fretting about a thin vinyl disc being shipped overseas. But it had been sold in CD form in the past so I'm hoping that there will be another re-release of "Just Tonight".

What made the disappointment somewhat more pointed was that I discovered another great track on this album. This is "Nagisa ni te" (On The Beach), and Kusunoki gives some more fine croon, and it would make the perfect background tune for the scene that I photographed up above in 2014 on the shores of the city of Ito in the evening. According to "Music Avenue", "Nagisa ni te" was composed by the late Hiroshi Narumi（鳴海寛）but I couldn't find out who had provided the lyrics. No matter...it's a nice urban contemporary piece which further keeps my hopes alive that I will procure "Just Tonight" someday in the not-too-distant future.

I was able to dig up some more information about the Tokyo-born Kusunoki on his J-Wiki profile, and it looks like he started his music career shortly after graduating from university by creating the band Camel Land（キャメル・ランド）with two singles and one album in the early 1980s. Under his name of Kyosuke Kusunoki, there was the one album and one single, both in 1985, but after that, he changed his name to Yuukou Kusunoki（楠木勇有行）with four singles and four albums going into the early 2000s. He has also been a special guest with the fusion band Casiopea（カシオペア）.