Kimiko Inaba -- Serenade（セレナーデ）

 

I've never served anywhere within the actual music industry but I've often heard about how talented singers can try their best but never really hit the big time for a variety of reasons. Those are just the breaks of life.

Reading the J-Wiki profile for singer-songwriter Kimiko "Maria" Inaba（稲葉喜美子）, I got that impression when it came to her career starting from around the 1970s. Born in Yokohama in 1957, she was the youngest of 7 children who became interested in music after listening to FEN Radio and began writing her own music from the age of 5. According to the lady herself, she got an especially big influence from Janis Joplin.

Although she went through the usual education, she also started performing in live houses from the age of 14, something that Inaba continued even when she entered the work force in the late 1970s. She even won the grand prize in the Kanto regional Lion Folk Village song contest in 1979, but a major illness felled her for a few years so that she wouldn't be able to make her professional debut with a single until 1982. Illness would continue to dog her and from looking at her history of single releases on J-Wiki, the rate was fairly sparse although Inaba released 7 albums between 1982 and 1990. 

An offer to have one of her songs, "Serenade", become the theme song for a Toei film, "Shimaizaka"（姉妹坂...Sister Hill）, unfortunately came to naught when it was quickly decided by the powers-that-be that another song would be used instead. "Serenade" had been put in as the theme for a TBS afternoon drama so perhaps the film producers may have preferred not to use something that had already been used. One more original album would come out in 1993 but soon after that, Inaba retired for good.

It's too bad that Inaba couldn't catch much of a break in the music industry since just judging from "Serenade", she could have had some success with her vocals and the folksy pop feeling from this particular song. It has a very pleasant lilt and the strings and harmonica enhance the ballad very nicely. Maybe timing was perhaps one of the unlucky factors too since "Serenade" sounds like a song that could have worked in the 1970s instead of it being released on Inaba's April 1987 album "No Comment".