ANNA -- Anna ni Koi Shita（あんなに恋した）

 

Going into the final full week of July 2022, perhaps we can start "Kayo Kyoku Plus" with a spicy Latin number. 

Yesterday, I wrote about Anna Banana（アンナ・バナナ）for the first time and one of her songs from the early 1990s. Lo and behold, I discovered another ANNA but with no last name and in full caps, and I was pleasantly surprised that she does have her own J-Wiki providing a few social media links. She hails from Chiba Prefecture and is currently a radio personality and a narrator.

However in the mid-1990s and for some years after that, she was also a singer with eight singles and two albums. From her second album, the March 1998 "Stories", here is her track "Anna ni Koi Shita" which could be a cute intentional pun in that it means either "I Fell So Much In Love" or "I Fell In Love With Anna". As you can hear, it's dance club form of exciting samba about ANNA herself possibly finding love and intrigue in Brazil. There's even some faint hint of Barry Manilow's "Copacabana".

From that J-Wiki article, I found out that ANNA had been part of Toshiki Kadomatsu's（角松敏生）VOCALAND project between 1996 and 1997 to introduce new female singers. Kadomatsu was also behind the production of "Stories" with Akio Inoue（井上秋緒）providing lyrics and Akira Okamoto（岡本朗）composing the samba. When Okamoto was himself a singer under the name Issei Okamoto（岡本一生）, he was quite happy with the City Pop in the late 1970s onwards with gems like "Midnight Station".

ANNA has an active blog and has been jockeying the Chiba Prefecture-based bayfm program "miracle!!" ever since it started in 2008. Below is a September 2016 broadcast.