Original Love -- Your Song

 

Welcome to August 2022! Over here, we're now entering the dog days of summer which will hopefully mean appropriately warm and sunny weather and then some refreshingly cool nights going into the latter half of the month. As well, some precipitation wouldn't be a bad thing either.

Years ago on the blog, I wrote about Original Love's elegant and heart-on-the-sleeve ballad "Primal"（プライマル）single from February 1996, and so I took another listen to that cute little CD again in whole. I was reminded of the coupling song "Your Song" which I do appreciate a lot more now.

"Your Song" is a song that Original Love, aka Takao Tajima（田島貴男）, wrote and composed first for his May 1995 5th original album "Rainbow Race", and the version didn't change any when it was used as the "Primal" partner track. It's a friendly and optimistic samba-flavoured tune with plenty of kids helping Tajima out on the vocals. In fact, according to J-Wiki and Tajima himself, the singer/creator of "Your Song" had wanted to come up with a song that would fit well with children's voices. His whole intention with this one was that no matter how good or bad a singer is, everyone has a song within themselves that's rarin' to burst out.

One piece of trivia here is that while Original Love was concocting "Your Song", he hadn't been aware that there was an even more famous "Your Song" by Elton John. Knowing what I know about Tajima, he probably would have shrugged his shoulders in indifference and gotten back to work. Doesn't matter to me either; "Your Song" is still a fine song.