Keizo Nakanishi -- Nemurenu Omoi (眠れぬ想い)

 

Doing the ol' maintenance again, I re-encountered my article for Keizo Nakanishi's（中西圭三）March 1994 album "Starting Over" which was my first time getting to know one of the finest voices in Japanese popular music in the 1990s, thanks to a taped copy of the album that I received from a relative. At one point, I thought my tape was going to wear out since I was playing it so often on the machine.

One of the tracks on "Starting Over" was "Nemurenu Omoi"(眠れぬ想い...Sleepless Feelings [or Memories]) and it was an orchestral version that I'd compared in the article for the album to one of the more tenderhearted aspects on the soundtrack from "Moonlighting", the mid-1980s detective sitcom starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis (it was the harmonica that sealed the deal). Since then, I've also come to think of that version as something that could have come out of a soundtrack for a 1950s romance film starring Cary Grant, thanks to those wonderful strings.

However, I realized that I hadn't written anything on the original single of "Nemurenu Omoi" which was Nakanishi's 9th from July 1993. If push came to shove, I'd probably go with the orchestral album version, but the original "Nemurenu Omoi" is still a lovely ballad as a pop/light soul number. The song also has a lot of big names in its creation beginning with Nakanishi composing the melody while Kanata Asamizu（朝水彼方）took care of the lyrics, Takao Konishi（小西貴雄）handled overall arrangement, Mitsuo Hagita（萩田光雄）arranged the strings and Kunio Muramatsu（村松邦男）from Sugar Babe（シュガーベイブ）handled the chorus arrangement.