Joe Hisaishi -- Night City

 

A few days ago, when I was looking up information on composer/arranger Joe Hisaishi's（久石譲）"Jinsei no Merry-Go-Round"（人生のメリーゴーランド）, just another one of the maestro's wonderful songs for Studio Ghibli, I also opted to see what else he had done early in his career. After all, it's always interesting how a veteran in the music industry began everything.

Well, in his J-Wiki profile, I saw in his singles category, his very first contribution was a song called "Night City" that he had released all the way back in August 1988. Looking at that title, I wondered whether he had actually concocted something City Pop, since it was the late 1980s. I rather scoffed at myself at first. This was the guy who had provided the music for "Nausicaa" and "Laputa" earlier on after all.

But then I discovered and played the video on YouTube, and man, was I in for a surprise! The video had been posted up almost two years ago, so I was definitely late to the party, but still, I was rather gobsmacked that he not only composed this fast-moving case of sophisti-pop in the big city, he also sang the tune. And would you get a load of his appearance on the CD single? He's ready to paint the town red! Warm up that sports car!

Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）provided the lyrics for Hisaishi's debut single. "Night City" was also a part of his 4th album, "illusion", which came out later in December that year.