Hi-Fi Set -- Hoshi no Stranger（星のストレンジャー）

 

Just continuing the City Pop into today from Friday but only because this particular song is up for the Yutaka Kimura Speaks treatment next week.

"Hoshi no Stranger" (Stranger from a Star) is the first track on vocal group Hi-Fi Set's（ハイファイセット）June 1976 2nd album, "Fashionable Lover" (and I've already spoken on the title track). Written by Yumi "Yuming" Arai（荒井由実）and composed/arranged by Masataka Matsutoya（松任谷正隆）, I'm not too sure on whether there is a real alien girl involved here or it's more of a figurative way to describe an odd but appealing young lady that a man has fallen head over heels with, but the arrows have pierced the lad's heart hard.

Usually when I think of Yuming, she takes care of both words and music, but this time, it's her future husband, Masataka, who is taking care of the melody here which has that 1970s sunny swinging City Pop line. But as we get further into the song, the line almost sounds as if it's about to derail...the arrangement gets a little frenetic and the vocalization is something that I hadn't heard from Hi-Fi Set before. So, I'll have to let it cook in my mind a bit more, and yeah, I would gather that an alien-human relationship needs to have a lot of time to smoothen things out anyways. Plus, I'd like to read what Kimura says about this one.