Chika Ueda -- Holy Night Tonight

 

Welcome to Hump Day! It certainly looks it out there. It's been dreary all day and with a ton of rain pouring on us this morning, there will be some high winds screaming in starting from around now, so we have to see if there will be power outages. On a more localized and cheerier note, I've picked up another couple of CDs from CD Japan with one of them being an old Chika Ueda（上田知華）album from the 1980s, something that I hadn't expected that I would ever see on sale again.

But more on that one later when I do get it. The purchase reminded me that I did have an Ueda Xmas-themed song in the backlog so it's time to get to that one. I have here "Holy Night Tonight" which was the final track on her November 1992 album "Asa Hiru Yoru Hare"（朝昼夜晴れ...Morning, Noon, Night and Sunny）. Now, when it comes to J-Xmas songs, they will always be either on the cheery party-time or depressing heartbreak theme, but they won't get into the religious aspects, so I didn't have any thoughts that the song would get into the birth of Christ or a manger despite the title.

As it is, "Holy Night Tonight" is an Ueda-created Xmas tune with some 90s City Pop and perhaps some House influences. Lyrically, it's about meeting an old flame in the city and perhaps igniting some old sparks despite the fact that the other is already married (definitely an unholy thought). Ueda also goes into her "yeah, yeah" here which was something that she was doing on one of the other tracks for "Asa Hiru Yoru Hare", "That's Why You Can't". The other notable thing about the song is that the saxophone solo gets a bit deranged. I couldn't track down who the saxophonist was, but I figure that they may have hit the nog a little too hard during recording.