MIO (MIQ) -- Morning Bell

 

Once again, my doctor would probably tsk-tsk me to Cholesterol Prison but the above breakfast is a most wonderful thing for me. In all fairness to me, though, I only have something this fatty "just" once a week.

However, there is also something to be said about a gorgeous sunny sky greeting someone in the morning. Meteorological and melodic are just as important as gastronomical, so to start off this Friday in the City Pop department, I give you MIO's "Morning Bell", the first track from her first album in 1984, "Starlight Shower".

It has a very cheerful beat and some notable string action (of course, the sax is also in there) that greet my ears like a relentlessly optimistic cruise director hailing passengers on a ship, and it must have been some wonderful early hours that inspired the creation of "Morning Bell". Lyricist Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）and composer Yuuichiro Oda（小田裕一郎）were responsible for the song, and they are the same team behind a number of Seiko Matsuda's（松田聖子）early songs such as her big 1980 hit "Aoi Sangoshou"（青い珊瑚礁）.

Actually, the Tokyo-born and Tottori Prefecture-raised MIO is more well known as an anison singer and has been known as MIQ since around 2001. On top of that, she's probably even more famous to the public at large for her jazzy rendition of the Yodobashi Camera jingle, but in the beginning of her career (according to her Wikipedia profile, it started in 1982) just judging from "Morning Bell", her vocals were a bit breezier but the soul was already intact.