Noriko Miyamoto -- After You've Gone

 

Since posting that April 2016 article on her "Zebra" track from Noriko Miyamoto's（宮本典子）"New Romance" album from 1981, I was able to get my copy of it. Indeed, it isn't what I was expecting.

I'd been expecting something along the lines of straight City Pop just like the first song by Miyamoto that I had heard, "Silver Rain". However, "New Romance" seems to waver quite a bit between City Pop and New Wave. Interestingly enough, this particular track from the album "After You've Gone", which is also the B-side to the "Silver Rain" single, is reflective of what I discovered about "New Romance". The City Pop is there but it's been embellished with some technopop bells and whistles. Some Latin rhythm has also been thrown in for good measure but again with that sheen of the computer bleeps and bloops. 

Lyricist Kazumi Yasui（安井かずみ）and composer Nobuyuki Shimizu（清水信之）took care of "After You've Gone". The aura in parts of the song also give out that feeling of a Henry Mancini theme for some 1960s or 1970s thriller drama. One might say that it comes across as a song representing an old-world private eye operating out of his hut on Tatooine.