Hi-Fi Set -- Mabushii Anata（まぶしい貴方）

 

For my fifth and final song for Friday, I'd been thinking of putting up that NHK theme song for the World Cup coverage that's been playing for months during the nightly sports segment, but the closest I could get was a mere TikTok excerpt. So, let's return to City Pop!

And we're going back to February 1977 when vocal trio Hi-Fi Set（ハイ・ファイ・セット）released "Love Connection" which would end up as the No. 1 album of the year. A little less than a month ago, I posted one track "Crystal Night"（クリスタル･ナイト）which had all sorts of elements of rock, disco, country and New Music. Usually, I would wait the entire month before putting in the same singer or group onto the blog.

However, I can break and bend the rules for Hi-Fi Set, especially with a No. 1 album. And with this other track from "Love Connection", it's worth it. "Mabushii Anata" which can be translated into "You Are Dazzling" (although one other YouTube video with the same song has it as "Putting It Down To The Way I Feel About You") isn't nearly as chock-filled with genre influences as its track mate "Crystal Night", but it's a straight-on nighttime breezy City Pop tune of the 1970s that would make for a pleasant drinking companion on a patio in some bar. I especially love those strings and the usual polished Hi-Fi Set harmonies.

Mieko Arima（有馬三恵子）and Kazue Ohashi（大橋一枝）provided the Japanese lyrics for the song which was composed by Ken Gold and Michael Denne with Ichizo Seo（瀬尾一三）providing the relaxing arrangement. I was curious about the composers...were they truly from America or elsewhere or were the names merely pseudonyms for coy Japanese songwriters? Well, as it turned out, after a bit of investigation, I found out that Gold and Denne were indeed bona fide songwriters who had created a song titled "You to Me Are Everything" for the British soul group The Real Thing in 1976. There's some similarity in the first verse when comparing this one to Hi-Fi Set's "Mabushii Anata" but in the end, they are different songs. Still, have a listen for comparison's sake.