I've been covering individual tracks from Junko Yagami's（八神純子）February 1982 album "Yume Miru Koro wo Sugite mo"（Even If The Time to Dream Passes） for a number of years now including "I'm a Woman" and "Secret Love"（シークレット・ラブ）. It's no surprise that these songs have had more than enough urban oomph to get them onto the blog on Fridays when I cover that sort of thing.
But the album begins with the title track itself and I'd say that the title track is more of a conventional pop ballad, although I'd been wondering whether I should have placed it during Urban Contemporary Fridays. Ultimately though, I opted to post it during a regular day. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with "Yume Miru Koro wo Sugite mo"; it's one of those Yagami ballads that features her alternating soaring and purring voice, beautiful contemplative piano by her, and those shimmering strings as part of the entire package. In a way, I think the ballad hearkens back to her very early days as a teen balladeer of the 1970s. Yagami and Ryuichi Kawamura（川村龍一）co-wrote the lyrics (under the pen name of Hisashi Kawamura) with the former handling the melody. Masataka Matsutoya（松任谷正隆）provided the arrangement.
It has been a while since I have listened to good ballad and this does sound very much like the kind of ballad (late 1970 to early 80's) I would hear on the radio back in the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I had been on the borderline between AOR and pop because there's some of the song that reminds me of Boz Scaggs' balladry, but in the end, I kept it in pop.
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