Mari Iijima -- Who's Right, Who's Wrong

 

Well, the next annoying thing to the fact that I have such a long backlog of songs to cover is the fact that it seems a good chunk of that backlog includes music that I have already covered. For whatever reason, I neglected to delete the songs from the list when I completed the articles. So, it's gotten quite a trim now although it's still plenty long.

One such song was Mari Iijima's（飯島真理）"Pink no Rouge"（ピンクのルージュ）that I was planning to do today, but I found out that I'd actually already done it back in December 2020 in the depths of the pandemic. Therefore, I decided to punch in Iijima's name and City Pop into the YouTube search engine, and I discovered this track from her May 1990 album "For Lovers Only". And for those AOR fans who see "Who's Right, Who's Wrong" as something familiar, you are absolutely right (not wrong!). "Who's Right, Who's Wrong" is the song that was originally recorded by the AOR band Pages (later to transform into chart hitmakers Mr. Mister in the 1980s) for their 1979 album "Future Street". In fact, I devoted a ROY article to the song back in 2020.

I've never listened to "For Lovers Only" but it's been listed on Iijima's J-Wiki page as a concept album, so perhaps she may have been covering those light and mellow tunes there. No one is going to beat Michael Brecker at that silky sax in the intro of the original, but Iijima's cover of "Who's Right, Who's Wrong" isn't too bad either and considering that the album came out in 1990, it's certainly nice if indeed the singer had wanted to bring back some of that old-fashioned West Coast soft rock back into our ears.

The whole thing here reminds me of the surprise that I got when I discovered that paris match had covered Kingo Hamada's（濱田金吾）"Yokaze no Information"（夜風のインフォメーション）.