Hitomi Tohyama -- Another Day, Another Love

Well, hello to Friday so we've got another City Pop day lined up. Last weekend, I decided to do pull another Van Paugam with the help of J Utah on YouTube, and to explain, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered this YouTube channel called J Utah which specializes in videos displaying long drives through the big cities of the world. In so doing, I realized that I could play one of my "Light Mellow" City Pop/J-AOR CDs and enjoy that Van Paugam City Pop radio experience once more. I actually did that with the "Avenue" disc of "Light Mellow" which had Masataka Matsutoya's（松任谷正隆）"Kizuita Toki wa Osoi Mono"（気づいた時は遅いもの）while watching the Tokyo Skyline video. Pure bliss!

This time around, though, it wasn't with a "Light Mellow" album but I used Rocket Brown's most recent Come Along Radio podcast, his Los Angeles mixtape of City Pop/AOR tunes surrounding his hometown. I listened to that while viewing one of J Utah's Los Angeles drives, downtown specifically. Again, it was a very nice experience indeed.

One of the first songs on the mixtape really clicked with me as the video approached the Staples Center, I believe, and that happened to be "Another Day, Another Love" by Hitomi "Penny" Tohyama（当山ひとみ）. I also realized that this was a cover of Junko Ohashi's（大橋純子）original rendition back in 1981 which I had already written about back in February 2019.

Listening to the two of them one after another initially, I couldn't really tell the difference, and that's not a pox on either house at all. But giving it another go today, perhaps I can say whereas Ohashi's "Another Day, Another Love" has that 1970s New York City sunny soul flavour, Tohyama's cover has got more of that slightly mellower West Coast feeling. In addition, being somewhat of the doofus that I am, I only realized today that Ohashi sang it in Japanese while Tohyama did her rendition in English. I am not sure who provided the English lyrics but it could have been Penny herself or the original lyricist Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）. Of course, the composer is still Yoshihiro Yonekura（米倉良広）.

"Another Day, Another Love" started off her 1982 album "Heart Full of L.A. Mind", so I can understand why Rocket Brown opted for this one for his Los Angeles-themed mix, and yeah, it certainly fits with a nice drive in downtown L.A. Her cover also reminds me of the first song that I had ever heard by Penny, "Our Lovely Days" that she would release the following year.