Ryoko Moriyama -- Hito Natsu no Shi Seikatsu（ひと夏の私生活）

 

Y'know...I've been doing "Kayo Kyoku Plus" long enough to know that there have been a number of artists over the years that have jumped the genre divide...and rather successfully, I might add. 70s teen aidoru such as Hideki Saijo（西城秀樹）, Hiromi Go（郷ひろみ）and Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）may have begun their careers singing those cute adolescent numbers but then switched into something more mature and urban contemporary, and even folk singers including Masashi Sada（さだまさし）and Iruka（イルカ）also traipsed into City Pop. By the same token, New Music and rock veteran Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）made that dramatic turn from plucking a bass guitar into jockeying synthesizers when he helped start up Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s.

I guess then that singer-songwriter Ryoko Moriyama（森山良子）is my latest discovery. I have known about her beginnings as a mellow folk singer from the late 1960s with "Kono Hiroi Nohara Ippai"（この広い野原いっぱい）and "Satokibi Batake"（さとうきび畑）and even the later part of her career when she sometimes took on bossa nova and straight-ahead pop. However, I hadn't been aware that at one point in the 1980s, she even tackled something like dynamic West Coast pop or AOR.

But that was apparently the case when she recorded her 40th album for release in May 1986, "At My Time". In fact, the launching track "Hito Natsu no Shi Seikatsu" (My Life One Summer), which was written by Keiko Aso（麻生圭子）and composed by Masamichi Sugi（杉真理）, sounds like something that Airplay would concoct for Moriyama. The drum hits and the 80s synthesizer that entered my ears from the start kinda caught me off guard as something that I wouldn't have expected from the gentle guitar-strumming singer. And yet, she really gets into "Hito Natsu no Shi Seikatsu" in the same way that I would launch into a tenderloin steak...medium-rare with a touch of soy sauce. 😋 It looks like that she was really savoring that summer.