Seiko Matsuda -- Tabitachi wa Freesia（旅立ちはフリージア）

Happy Monday to you all! And a Happy Birthday to Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）in Japan since it's already March 10th over there. Found out about the auspicious anniversary through tweets so many thanks to the Seiko-chan fans.

Deciding to start off the work week with an article about Matsuda, I began scrolling down her discography of singles and soon got into repeated declarations of "Nope, did that one...nope, that did one". 66 articles devoted to Seiko material will do that to one. However, not one to despair, I did find a song for No. 67.

And incredibly enough for me, it is a single that I had actually never heard by Seiko-chan since it was first included onto her BEST album "Bible II" which I don't currently possess ("Bible I" I do have and "Train" which is the collection of Yuming/Takashi Matsumoto-penned tunes). "Tabitachi wa Freesia" (Setting Off is Freesia) was her 26th single from September 1988, and it was utilized as the campaign tune for an event called "Orient Express '88" to commemorate Fuji-TV's 30th anniversary which started in Paris and ended in Tokyo.

Not sure whether "Tabitachi wa Freesia" quite matched the majesty and history of the Orient Express, but indeed it is a happy late-1980s Seiko pop song with those familiar vocals, a continuing beat sounding like the click-clacking of a train, and even an inclusion of some exotic instrument near the end for that traveling-far-afield feeling. Yukihide Takekawa（タケカワユキヒデ）from the band Godiego（ゴダイゴ）composed the song while Matsuda herself provided the lyrics, the first time that she had ever done so for one of her tunes. Then, Akira Inoue（井上鑑）took care of the arrangement.

According to J-Wiki, "Tabitachi no Freesia" was her then-record-setting 24th consecutive No. 1 single going all the way back to "Kaze wa Aki Iro"（風は秋色）from 1980 (that record would be broke a little less than a dozen years later by the duo B'z). It would also be her final No. 1 for about 8 years. The song also ended up as the 37th-ranked single for 1988.