When I was prepping this article up in the Labels, I found out that there was already a "Melody" in there, and so the yellow alert went off in my head that I may be repeating myself on a song. However, as it turns out, that Melody was a 1990s aidoru group that Marcos V. wrote about back in February 2015.
The Melody（メロディー）that I am talking about here is very different in that they were male, a duo, and were active in the 1970s and 1980s, and as such, I have distinguished them from the aidoru group Melody by placing them in Labels as "Melody (folk duo)". Consisting of lead vocalist/composer Junichi Fukudome（福留順一）and guitarist/lyricist Shoji Sakamoto（坂元昭二）, Melody came up with four singles and six albums between 1976 and 1983 during their original run, according to their own website.
Their debut single, "Kagai Jugyo" (Extracurricular Lessons) was released in September 1976, and it's a beautiful folk ballad that also has hints of urban contemporary in there so that perhaps it can also be considered to be a New Music tune. I couldn't find the lyrics online but from what I could understand from listening to the song a few times is that it extends the kayo trope of romance falling in the autumn into the year-end in the dead of winter. The lyrics also take a tragic turn as they progress since it seems as if a heartbroken high school boy is mourning the suicide of a girl he loved due to the stresses of exam season. As Fukudome sings, his youth has been permanently shattered to the extent that he has dropped out.
According to the information for the above video, Melody held a concert in 2008 at a venue called Marquee. They had actually got back together earlier in the decade in 2001 and even had a cross-country tour in 2018 through five cities, with a new album coming out in April that year, "Bokura no Jidai"（僕らの時代...Our Generation）.
Hello, Brian. Thanks for the lyrics, and yep, they're as sad as I'd thought.
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