Happy Monday! Temperatures are up to a balmy 14 degrees C today. Maybe in Tokyo, that might be the signal that the dreaded winter is heading their way but here in Toronto, that's cause to believe that summer is making a heady return near the end of the year.
Well, then, how about putting up an appropriately summery aidoru tune to start off this work week? Here is Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）with her "Ai no Shinwa" (Love Legend), and this was a track from her 3rd album, the May 1981 "Silhouette". The song shares space with the aidoru's big hit "Natsu no Tobira"（夏の扉）which was the very first Seiko-chan song that I ever heard.
The lyrics of cute puppy love romance were provided by Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）and the bouncy oh-so-early-80s aidoru-friendly melody came from Yuuichiro Oda（小田裕一郎）. Keyboardist Kazuo Nobuta（信田かずお）took care of the arrangement and that intro reminded me of something very AOR until Oda's melody settled into that familiar early Seiko summer music (although the galloping beat still leaves some resonance of that genre), and Nobuta is known for his partnership with guitarist Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）in the one-off project The Milky Way which begat the 1979 album "Summertime Love Song".
"Ai no Shinwa" actually finishes "Silhouette" which I thought was interesting since I would have thought that a ballad would be the usual type of song to end an album from that time, but I have no complaints here. It's a positive way to end things and Seiko's slightly squeaky vocals remind me of how early in her career this was. I especially like how she delivers the line "Ai wa echo, ai wa echo"（愛はエコー、愛はエコー...Love is an echo） and again that galloping beat. In a way, I think that this would have been an ideal song for Lynn Minmay of "Macross" fame. The album, by the way, got as high as No. 2 on Oricon.
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