Akina Nakamori -- Farewell

Back in 2014, I wrote about "Firestarter", a track from Akina Nakamori's（中森明菜）1988 12th album "Stock". It is one of only two tracks that I remember from "Stock", a tape cassette purchase that was one of a series of her albums in the late 1980s that I've tended to forget and ignore simply because her album material at that time never truly meshed with me.

Well, the other song from "Stock" is "Farewell", that first track which I've always thought was ironically titled since it seems like Akina and song were giving a great big "HELLO!" instead. Hearing this as the launching song for the album, I did have some hope for the rest of the album, but alas, it didn't really come to pass with the exception of the hard rock "Firestarter".

If I were to give a comparison of these two songs, I would say that they were two sides of a coin. "Firestarter" was more rock than pop, whereas "Farewell" was more on the pop side of things with a rock edge. Written by Eiko Kyo（許瑛子）and composed by Ken Sato（佐藤健）, it's the type of tune that I expect would be sung by rock era Ann Lewis, but I think "Farewell" (and "Firestarter", for that matter) work fine with Akina since she's got that famous low projecting vibrato since her slightly earlier Oricon-friendly hits.

As much as I envisage a city drive with City Pop, the pop-rock "Farewell" also has me thinking of bombing down the highway in a convertible. If I'm going to use a Hollywood movie from that decade as an analogy, "Streets of Fire" comes to mind. Incidentally, the arrangers behind "Farewell" are Satoshi Nakamura（中村哲）, who was part of the fusion band Prism back in the 1970s, and Kenji Kitajima（北島健二）, a member of the band Fence of Defense.