Yui Asaka -- Melody

 

I never got to know Yui Asaka（浅香唯）and her music all that well in the late 1980s aside from her hit "C-Girl" through fellow J-Pop friends. Also, there's the fact that she cut quite the photogenic figure in "Myojo" magazine.

However, after completing this week's ROY article with her "Melody" included in the Oricon list, I felt that I had to write about this 12th single by the Miyazaki Prefecture native. At the same time, "Melody", which was released in November 1988, is a fun and catchy number with a nice thrumming rhythm and all sorts of happy synths bouncing off the walls after their first sip of absinthe. Plus, Asaka has got quite the appealingly chirpy voice.

Apparently, the above video is for the album version of "Melody", and the album is "Melody Fair", her 6th release from March 1989. I don't know what the single version sounds like unfortunately but perhaps the album version is somewhat more oomphed up. According to the J-Wiki article on the song, Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）was supposed to have been behind the creation of the melody, but it turns out that his old bandmate from TM Network, Naoto Kine（木根尚登）, came up with the happy-go-lucky summer song. Yukinojo Mori（森雪之丞）provided the lyrics. The single made it all the way up to No. 2 on the Oricon weeklies and was the 66th-ranked single for 1988. Meanwhile, "Melody Fair" also hit No. 2 on the album rankings.