Yoko Oda -- Koi wa Sensation（恋はセンセーション）

Happy Valentine's Day to all out there. Hopefully, everyone managed to get some sort of chocolate, rose or message of love. Locally, it was darn frigid today; this morning was about -19 degrees Celsius, but as they say "Cold hands, warm heart".

I was kinda thinking about what appropriate tune I could put up to commemorate February the 14th, but I think that I've already written up some of the major love songs. At this point, I was willing to write on anything with the Japanese ai（愛）or koi（恋）, and then I found this tune on the waiting list.

There's still not a lot that I know about Yoko Oda's（小田陽子）discography although I have written on a couple of her songs in the past. My last number about her was "New York 1961 Fuyu"（ニューヨーク1961冬）from 1982, a lonely and impressionable jazzy ballad, so it was with some surprise that I came across tonight's song for this article, "Koi wa Sensation" (Love is a Sensation), a single by Oda that was released in 1986. It is quite the tangent away from what I had heard from her in the past in that "Koi wa Sensation" sounds like a pensive New Wave song from my university days with that nostalgic synthesizer. I don't really think that Oda could drape herself on top of that instrument like she could on a grand piano while singing the torch song that's "New York 1961 Fuyu".

Not sure if there were ever a music video accompanying "Koi wa Sensation" but if there were, I could imagine Oda stalking on high-heel boots while all in black with those cosmetics including heavy eye makeup and dagger-like blush on her cheeks. Man, perhaps my nostalgia for New Wave has gotten a little too ahead of my control. In any case, according to the JASRAC database, Rei Nakanishi（なかにし礼）provided the Japanese lyrics.

Yes, I did state that Nakanishi wrote the Japanese lyrics since "Koi wa Sensation" is a cover of the original "Ouragan" by none other than Princess Stephanie of Monaco, her debut single released in March 1986. Created by Marie Leonor and Romano Musumarra, it did big in Europe, including in France where it spent 10 consecutive weeks at No. 1. What I also didn't know was that another Japanese singer, Akemi Ishii（石井明美）, covered it in her debut album, "Mona Lisa"（モナリザ）under the title "Koi wa Fumetsu"（恋は不滅...Love is Immortal）but unfortunately, I couldn't find that version online, except a very short excerpt at Amazon.

I don't know how Oda's cover did, but it was placed as one of eight extra tracks on a remastered version of her 1983 album "Shadow & Me". So I gather that I have found another Japanese cover of a moody 80s synthpop tune.