Another pleasant surprise from a singer that I hadn't heard of before, Mutsumi Inoue's（井上睦都実）"Nitamono Doushi" (Kindred Spirits) hails from her third and final full studio album "Shiawase na Denim"（幸せなデニム...Happy Denim） from July 1994. For some reason, the album has been categorized as an aidoru creation according to its J-Wiki article, and though I know that I'm just going with this one track, I don't know whether Inoue would be considered a teenybopper singer, at least for "Shiawase na Denim".
"Nitamono Doushi" is a pretty polished summer pop song in my opinion and Inoue shares some vocal qualities with Misato Watanabe（渡辺美里）although I don't know whether the former has that boomer quality like the latter. There's also a hint of some West Coast AOR through the keyboards and the wailing electric guitar. "Nitamono Doushi" does have that contemporary 90s sheen but overall I believe that it could almost have been lifted straight from the decade before. Inoue herself wrote the lyrics and she was backed up some pretty solid songwriters as well with Akito Kitayose（片寄明人）from the band GREAT 3 handling the melody and Tatsuya Nishiwaki（西脇辰弥）from the amazing one-and-done group PAZZ being responsible for the smooth arrangement of this particular song as well as the rest of "Shiawase na Denim".
Inoue hails from Kumamoto Prefecture but was also raised in Fukuoka Prefecture, and along with her jobs of being a singer and a lyricist, she was also a model. In addition to those four studio albums, she released five singles between 1992 and 1994 and three mini-albums up to 2001. Finally, Inoue has provided lyrics for songs recorded by singers including Hitomi Shimatani（島谷ひとみ）, Hikaru Nishida（西田ひかる）and Satoshi Ikeda（池田聡）.
Indeed it is.
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