Nanase Aikawa -- Crying

 

It's been a good long while since I've written about J-rocker Nanase Aikawa（相川七瀬）. In fact, whenever I think of her, my mind will always go back to her time in the mid-1990s.

Back in 2013, I wrote about one of my favourites by Aikawa which was "Cosmic Love", her 12th single from March 1999. It's definitely one of those fun and crazy sleep-rousers that had me rushing out to the CD shop to track it down and then purchase it. The coupling song, "Crying", though, makes for quite the counterpoint as it is a more introspective pop/rock ballad that sounds as if it had been made in the 80s or early 90s. Written by Aikawa and composed by Hiroshi Uemura（上邑博）, it stands out to me because I usually just hear her uptempo material so a ballad actually comes across as refreshing.

It also makes me wonder what has Aikawa been doing over the past couple of decades. According to her J-Wiki profile, her musical career hasn't officially ended, but she's also now known as a psychotherapist and is based in Tokyo's Kokugakuin University in its Shinto Studies department.