Tetsuji Hayashi -- Monochrome no Natsu（モノクロームの夏）

 

Let's see...this morning, I woke up to 2 degrees Celsius with a -3-degree wind chill outside. Yeah, I'd say that summer has been erased from our environs (although perhaps Indian Summer might visit us next month).

Still, I have a few summer songs in the backlog to bring onto the blog including this one by singer-songwriter Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）. Believe it or not, the February 1989 "Monochrome no Natsu" (Monochrome Summer) was only his own 6th single from a long career that began in the early 1970s, but I gather that he was too busy providing other singers with his compositions or he was never too much into cutting singles. Anyways, with Masao Urino（売野雅勇）providing the lyrics, Hayashi composed and sang "Monochrome no Natsu" which begins sounding like either an AOR tune or something by the Matsutoyas, but it becomes a surprisingly punchy rather than groovy pop song thanks to those synths.