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Recently, when I was teaching my student, our textbook showed us how to make 6-word descriptions of people to practice adjectives and small phrases. I gather that it's like coming up with an English version of haiku poetry. Well, when it comes to veteran singer-songwriter Anri（杏里）, I feel like saying: beautiful, summery, breezy, city, pop and Hawaii.
So, with that list in mind, perhaps some of us KKP old-timers remember that article I posted of Anri's September 1981 third album "Kanashimi no Kujaku"（哀しみの孔雀）way back in 2013. It was definitely an outlier from how I just described her as the singer tried out some other genres for size. "Kanashimi no Kujaku" will never go down as one of my absolute favourite albums by her, but it's interesting for how she sounded back then.
I did get a used copy of the album a long time ago, so I actually missed out on the remastered version which contained bonus tracks including Anri's 6th single which had never been placed onto an original album. "Kawaii Pauline" (Cute Pauline) from September 1980 was written by Reiko Yukawa（湯川れい子）and composed by Keiichi Suzuki（鈴木慶一）of The Moonriders and it sounds like a 1960s pop tune filtered somewhat through Paris. The song was used as a promotion for a women's weekly magazine.
I have to say that seeing young Anri on the cover, she looked like a junior high school student happy to be on a holiday vacation. Well, she wasn't a junior high school student at that time but perhaps a college co-ed and she was technically still a teenager at 19.
There are no doubts about where the B-side, "Maui Moon", is located in terms of title and music. It's just a short-and-sweet luau jam session after some poi that was whipped up by the same folks behind the A-side. It only showed up on an Anri BEST compilation from 1982, "Omoikiri American ~ I Love Poping World, Anri"（思いきりアメリカン 〜I Love Poping World, Anri〜）. The lass definitely looked more grown-up on the cover of that one although I'm not sure what that gerund in the title is referring to aside from pop music or the Pontiff.
Anri was always versatile! Her 1978 debut song 「オリビアを聴きながら」 is very different from the two songs you wrote about two days ago, which are again very different from her trademark or milestone『Timely!!』but enough said about that album. I am very happy you are introducing the world to more and more of Anri's discography.
ReplyDeleteHello, Brian. Some of her earlier stuff may not be to all tastes but at the very least, they provide some fascinating observations. So, yes, it's good that they're getting out there through YouTube.
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