Tyrone Hashimoto -- Livin' Inside My Love

First off, I hope folks in Japan are doing OK as Typhoon Faxai starts scouring the Pacific coast including the Tokyo area. I was talking with my student last night and it may be somewhat iffy whether he will be able to head into work early in the morning. Looking at the live stream cameras for the city, the rain is coming down hard but the high winds haven't quite started to invade the Kanto yet.

Secondly, I gotta give my compliments to my good friend Jerry of Come Along Radio for leading me to this fellow Tyrone Hashimoto. We were having a nice talk earlier this morning about the various City Pop artists when he mentioned his latest acquisition on vinyl, Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut album from 1978, and specifically the track "Simoon", the technopop ode to 40s and 50s tropical nightclub fare via Mos Eisley.

Jerry let me know that the vocoder-enhanced crooner in "Simoon" was singer-songwriter Shunichi Hashimoto（橋本俊一）which was the stage name for Shunichi Suzuki（鈴木俊一）from Tochigi Prefecture, according to his J-Wiki profile. He's been in the music business since 1971 and has been contributing his vocals onto records since that YMO gig and providing plenty of songs for commercials since 1982. In 1983, Hashimoto changed his nom de guerre from Shunichi to Tyrone（タイロン橋本）and has continued to release albums right up to 2018.

His second album under Tyrone Hashimoto is "Moments of Love" from 1988 and I found this track "Livin' Inside My Love" which is, for the most part, a smooth-as-silk tune that takes things wholly to the American side of urban contemporary rather than the Japanese genre of City Pop...the same direction that Junko Yagami（八神純子）was taking at around the same time. Hashimoto has that earnest delivery which reminds me of another singer that I discovered a few years earlier, Junk Fujiyama（ジャンクフジヤマ）. I think the only thing that clumps up the silk a bit is when he tries out some of those vocal acrobatics near the end and doesn't quite stick the landing. Sorry if I'm acting like the Russian judge here. Still, I want to learn more about the vocoder-less Hashimoto through "Moments of Love" along with some of his other releases over the years.

Many thanks, Jerry!