Yutaka Kimura Speaks: Yasuhiro Abe -- Irene（アイリーン）

 

I began City Pop crooner Yasuhiro Abe's（安部恭弘）file on KKP on February 7th 2012, just a little outside of a week following the birth of the blog itself. And that first song is "Irene" which still stands as my favourite song by the Tokyo-born former tutor.

I've given my thoughts on the song there but at least one of them is a mistake born out of naivete so if you can find them, I do apologize but I still wanted to keep things pristine if not totally accurate out of a sense of what I'd said back then. And this brings me to why I'm seemingly bringing back Abe and "Irene" once more in 2023. I thought I could provide another angle to the song by providing translations by one other person...someone who has been in the Japanese music industry and put them all under a new Label: Yutaka Kimura Speaks.

Freelance music writer Yutaka Kimura（木村ユタカ）has worn a few different hats while working at a major record store such as a manager and a buyer before taking on writing in the year 2000. In 2002, he, along with some other contributors, spearheaded a book compilation of 500 albums titled "Japanese City Pop" which became a bible for me in terms of songs under that umbrella. In fact, a few days following that first Abe article on the blog, I wrote about "Japanese City Pop".

There was a second edition of "Japanese City Pop" but then in 2020, a revised edition of the book, now with 700 albums, was published. Former KKP contributor JTM was kind enough to send that edition to me as a Xmas present last year. In addition to the extra 200 albums that have been included, Kimura also inserted a new section near the end of the book titled "Japanese City Pop Masterpieces 100" which go into those one hundred selected songs of the genre.

I'm starting off with No. 2 in the series and that is Abe's scintillating "Irene". Each of his descriptions is basically just a blurb but I thought that it would be nice to hear what Kimura said. Not sure if I will cover every song in the series but let's see how it goes. Obviously, things are going a bit long here because of my written babbling but future entries will be short and sweet. Anyways, I'll let the writer take it from here.

Number: 002

Lyricist: Chinfa Kan 

Composer: Yasuhiro Abe

Arranger: Nobuyuki Shimizu

From his 1984 album "SLIT"

Within Yasuhiro Abe's many songs, this stands out as a masterpiece overflowing with David Foster flavour and it's the type of song that would be seen as something way ahead of its time. Even so, Shimizu's arrangement and keyboard phrasing are just out of this world. I can truly feel the blue-eyed soul floating wistfully within the song.