imase -- NIGHT DANCER

 

I guess that I can add the good folks at Japan's "Weathernews" as a source for new music to be discovered. Yesterday, I was just casually leaving the YouTube channel for the station open while I performed my usual blog maintenance when the caster introduced the relatively new segment known as "Weather Music". It's the brief part where J-Pop songs from a variety of decades are played while the weather maps and temperatures are shown and perhaps the caster gets a bit of a break or an update.

Well, the song on that particular "Weather Music" segment was a new one for me. It was "NIGHT DANCER" by singer-songwriter imase from Gifu Prefecture. The song came out as his 5th digital single last year in August and though it's not a Neo-City Pop tune per se, it does have that amiable urban feeling to it as a couple having to deal with yet another humdrum night but at least they are together to enjoy that humdrum night. "NIGHT DANCER" managed to get up to No. 38 on the Billboard Japan Hot 100, and since then, a couple of remixes of the song have been getting out this year.

From what I've read of his profile on J-Wiki and Wikipedia so far, it seems like imase is the latest Luke Skywalker for J-Pop. After only getting into songwriting for a year, this young man in his early twenties had already been getting his debut single out there in 2021, and less than half a year after that, he got the gig to sing the Pocari Sweat jingle, something that only established artists usually get. Business has apparently also been booming on his social network accounts. The Force has truly been with him, so I wouldn't be surprised if he were invited to the Kohaku Utagassen in a couple of months.