Kumiko Yamashita -- Bathroom kara Ai wo Komete（バスルームから愛をこめて）

Admittedly, I don't know as much about Kumiko Yamashita（山下久美子）as I know about some of the other singers such as Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）and Akina Nakamori（中森明菜）, but my impression of Yamashita has been that of a firebrand singer along the same lines as Ann Lewis（アン・ルイス）(feel free to correct me, if I'm wrong). To be honest, the only song that I know well by her is "Sekido Komachi Doki"（赤道小町ドキッ）, her big hit from 1982.

Therefore, as I've done before, I've always tried to go back to veteran singers' origins in terms of what they debuted with. And so it goes with Yamashita. Her first single was "Bathroom kara Ai wo Komete" (From Bathroom With My Love), released in June 1980.

Once again, just from the few times that I've seen her interviewed on TV, I've also had the impression that Yamashita has a fun and somewhat saucy personality, so when I first saw this title "Bathroom kara Ai wo Komete", my eyebrows got rather saucy in response. However, as it turns out, there isn't really anything lascivious about her debut single at all. In fact, Masataka Matsutoya's（松任谷正隆）arrangement of Toshio Kamei's（亀井登志夫）melody is cute 1950s innocence (helped in part by Time Five's backup chorus), the type of song that I would have expected Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）to have tackled early in her career. For that matter, Chinfa Kan's（康珍化）lyrics actually relate a woman fleeing to a bathroom in misery and fury on finding out her beau has been cheating on her.

With "Sekido Komachi Doki", Yamashita has that high-pitched chirpy delivery, but with "Bathroom", it's a fair bit lower and perhaps closer to that of the aforementioned Lewis. "Bathroom" was also the title track for her debut LP released on the same day as the single.