Akira Inoue -- Prophetic Dream（預言者の夢）

Based on my affinity for the first track of this album, I purchased singer-songwriter Akira Inoue's（井上鑑）1982 debut, "Prophetic Dream" which has the Japanese-language subtitle of "Yogensha no Yume". And by first track, I mean the catchy Steely Dan-esque "Bartok no Kage"（バルトークの影）which I've already written about.

Very glad to have bought "Prophetic Dream", too, since the songs have unfolded to me wholly as a concept album of sorts. The lyric sheet reveals what I theorize is basically Inoue's take on "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut. Including "Bartok no Kage", the sheet has the singer and we listeners go back and forth through time like a ping-pong ball. For instance, for that first track, we head over to Hungarian pianist and composer Bela Bartok's new home in the suburbs of New York City after fleeing the Nazis in 1940. For each song, Inoue kindly provides under the lyrics a photo and history of the subject and even the Japanese translations of any English words he uses in the song. It's like Wikipedia years before Wikipedia.

Once again, just like some of the more recent albums I've bought, "Prophetic Dream" isn't just City Pop. "Gravitations" is actually Inoue's debut single from October 1981. And it's more of a harder-edged AOR or perhaps even New Wave song with all of us popping over to Valentine's Day 1978 in London where 28-year-old Mr. Sudo from Tokyo lands in London to fulfill his studies in becoming a photographer. However, the poor lad gets all of his equipment stolen soon after his arrival, and he ends up working at an interior design workshop called OVAL HOUSE. How's that for a backstory?

"Gravitations" was also used as the campaign tune for a Yokohama Tire ad.

Next, let's all head over to the Bay of Biscay in France in the year 1966 for "Laetitia"（レティシア）which is inspired by one of the characters from the Robert Enrico film "The Last Adventure". It's got a bit of funk, a bit of Latin, and even a bit of City Pop for that feeling of international adventuring. This was Inoue's 2nd single from January 1982, and like his first one, it was also used to sell those Yokohama Tires.

Link to iTunes for brief excerpts from the album.

Unfortunately, the above two songs are the only ones that I could find on YouTube, but I could find a couple of more tracks elsewhere. For example, here is "Lindbergh no Monogatari"（リンドバーグ物語...The Story of Lindbergh） which takes place on May 20th 1927 when Charles Lindbergh is about to make his historic flight from New York across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris. It's an optimistic tune with a feeling of Buggles as that Spirit of St. Louis takes off into the wild blue yonder.

Then, there is "Cosmonaut" which is one spacey and dramatic faintly City Pop tune which takes place in the year 2147 with space pilot Leonard Gregg flying his ship for the last time as it suffers a catastrophic accident and burns up in the atmosphere. Apparently, his wife may have been onboard also as a possible crew member, and the tragic lyrics hint that their kids are on Earth below looking up at the night sky as a shooting star, unaware that it is their parents' craft burning up.

I wish that there were more songs available for listening since Inoue takes us to February 1979 in "Subway-Hero" as Curtis Sliwa and his Guardian Angels fight the good fight in the East Bronx against a musical backdrop that sounds like Billy Joel during his pop-rock phase at around the same time, and he even journeys over to the maiden voyage of the doomed Titanic in 1912 via "Lost Passengers" and its dreamy techno-Vaudevillian arrangement, reminiscent of Kazuhiro Nishimatsu（西松一博）. However, you can hear excerpts of all of the tracks at Apple Music. "Prophetic Dream" is quite the spatial-temporal trip, musically speaking.