Thursday, May 2, 2024

Hitomi Tohyama -- Itsu kara kashira(いつからかしら)

 

In reading up for this posting, I noticed that Hitomi Penny Tohyama's(当山ひとみ)album "Munasawagi"(胸さわぎ...Premonitions) has two different years that it was released depending on the website: either 1988 or 1992 which is quite the discrepancy. The person taking care of the Japanese-language site "90's City Pop Record Book" has given the theory that the 1988 was the original year for the LP while 1992 was the time when the CD version was put out onto shelves. Heck, I'm good with that.

One reason that I'm going with 1992 as the source year for "Munasawagi" is the second track "Itsu kara kashira" (Since When, I Wonder?) because the song doesn't sound like either the City Pop or the funky R&B that Tohyama was famous for during the 1980s. I've listened to it a few times already and I think that the song is a groovy light pop tune overall with an arrangement that sounds quite familiar for a lot of Japanese female singers back in the early 1990s. Megumi Ayukawa(鮎川めぐみ)was the lyricist here while Yukio Sugi(杉征夫)was the composer. In a way, it's kinda like Penny leaving the nightclub with the sun coming over the horizon and a morning on the way.

2 comments:

  1. Good job! I think you have solved this mystery! Apple itunes music sometime list the what I thought to be the wrong dates for songs, but now I am going to be checking if the dates are actually of the CD or other versions.

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    Replies
    1. Hello, Brian. Yeah, I've seen this sort of thing before with "competing" release years. Usually I have to see images of the original record to check what year it was put out.

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