Well, last week was all about that series of articles on Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）interview with Yahoo News Japan on the cusp of his first album in eleven years, "Softly", coming out on June 22nd. It has come out and unsurprisingly, that one corner of YouTube is blossoming with videos of various aspects of his 14th original album. There are a couple of tracks that I'm familiar with: "Recipe"（レシピ）and "Mirai no Tehma"（ミライのテーマ）.
But here is the video for one of the new songs on "Softly", "Love's On Fire". Written, composed, and arranged by Tats with him playing pretty much all of the instruments, I would have been tempted to call it a slice of Neo City Pop but that would be inaccurate. If anything, I'd say that it was more synth dance-pop than anything else. It doesn't matter, though, since it's still one catchy song that is great for a Friday night like tonight, especially watching the young happy people dancing away in a metropolitan club.
From the J-Wiki description of the music video, the director Yuuichi Kodama（児玉裕一）had wanted to go for a "boy meets girl" theme and indeed that is what we get with the camera focusing on the Boy, choreographer and model ENDo, and the Girl, actress Yuumi Kawai（河合優実）. The two of them do their stuff separately until they finally meet and love is on fire. Not sure if things happen that sweetly and innocently at the Gas Panic.
Looking forward to hearing some of the other tracks over the coming days.
"Softly" entered the Oricon chart at no. 1, having sold 151,000 physical copies in its first week. It is his 12th no. 1 album. Also, Yamashita is now one of the four artists who has reached no. 1 at least once during the Showa, Heisei and Reiwa eras.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for the update. It's always good to hear that Tats has still got it!
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