Saturday, April 30, 2022

Goro Noguchi & Hiromi Iwasaki -- Suki da Nante Ienakatta(好きだなんて言えなかった)

 

As I mentioned in the article for Yoko Minamino's(南野陽子)"Hanashi Kaketakatta"(話しかけたかった)the other day, NHK's "Uta Con"(うたコン)had some of those aidoru from yesteryear to perform their old hits. In addition to Nanno, there were Goro Noguchi(野口五郎), one of the Shin-Gosanke(新御三家), and the beautifully-voiced Hiromi Iwasaki(岩崎宏美), both of whom got their starts in the 1970s.

Near the end of the show, Noguchi and Iwasaki performed a duet which became singles for the both of them released in November 2021: Iwasaki's 69th and Noguchi's 64th. "Suki da Nante Ienakatta" (I Couldn't Say Something Like I Love You) sounds as if: 1) it was magically transferred from David Foster's recording studio in the 1980s and 2) it had been meant for a Disney film. It's got that power ballad feeling through composer Masaaki Mori's(森正明)melody and arranger Kotaro Nakagawa's(中川幸太郎)arrangement.

Another Goro, Goro Matsui(松井五郎), was responsible for the bittersweet lyrics of two friends having a reunion after some years and lamenting the fact that if only either of them had uttered those three special words to the other, perhaps the future would have been markedly different. But the end of the song hints that maybe, just maybe, they could make up for lost time. Power to them!💗

2 comments:

  1. I was hoping you'd cover this collab 😄. On another note, I looked up Matsui and found he'd written lyrics for a new song for Toshihiko Tahara last month: "ロマンティストでいいじゃない"; kind of a more straight-ahead throwback to Broadway jazz like "ハッとして!Good". Here's a link to the BTS of the MV: https://t.co/kC1N3Qqgi3

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    1. Thanks very much, Justin. I'm always a fan of the old stuff.

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