Senri Oe -- Stella's Cough

Happy Monday! Hopefully, I can indeed provide some of that good cheer for you with this particular song by singer-songwriter Senri Oe（大江千里）. Rocket Brown of Come Along Radio and I had a nice little chat for an hour on Saturday, and compared our lockdown situations in California and Ontario respectively, before talking about our mutual favoured genre of City Pop.

He introduced me to this one track from Oe's 6th album "OLYMPIC" from March 1987 called "Stella's Cough". This is an interesting title for one fun upbeat song. The horns (synth and real) and bouncing bass are in there to provide some goodly dollops of funk, but I'm not quite sure yet whether I would qualify  "Stella's Cough" as a City Pop tune. What it is, though, is a catchy R&B/pop creation that I am not surprised that Oe would concoct. The lyrics talk about some tempest-in-a-teacup relationship with the titular Stella, a relationship that has even gotten the neighbours riled up. I could easily imagine Oe starring in his own comedy based on the song as he deals with his own Stella.

Though Oe has been a jazz musician for the past several years, when he enjoyed his pop star status in the late 1980s, I remember him as someone who could weave very happy listenable songs as if he were one of those old-timey composers in New York City bouncing off all sorts of riffs on the piano as he and associates desperately came up with the latest hit commercial jingle. In my article on the song that I first knew him for as a singer, "Kakko Warui Furarekata"（格好悪いふられ方）, I compared him to his contemporaries Kan and Noriyuki Makihara（槇原敬之）. Well, I can see the current young and comely songwriting popster Gen Hoshino（星野源）as being the second coming of Oe in terms of his output and personality to a certain extent.

As for "OLYMPIC", it peaked at No. 3 on the Oricon album charts. I was curious about who was backing him up on chorus in "Stella's Cough" but I couldn't find out, although it's been stated in the J-Wiki article for the album that just-as-supremely cheerful Misato Watanabe（渡辺美里）was backing him up on a couple of other tracks on "OLYMPIC".