Back on March 26th, I provided an article on Tomoyo Harada's（原田知世）"Hoshi no Deja Vu"（星のデジャ・ヴ）, a pleasant and wistful song that works fine with the aidoru's soft and purring vocals. It was also the B-side to her7th single from July 1985, "Soushun Monogatari"（Early Spring Story）.
So, finally we've come to the A-side, and "Soshun Monogatari", which was also used as the theme song for a Harada movie of the same name, is a pretty different animal. Written by Chinfa Kan（康珍化）and composed by Hideya Nakazaki（中崎英也）, it was arranged by Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）into this ballroom waltz style in triple time according to the J-Wiki article. It's quite the moody and bittersweet affair but it doesn't quite encapsulate the plot of the movie which is pretty wild from what I could read on its Wikipedia page.
"Soshun Monogatari" reached No. 4 on Oricon and ended up as the 73rd-ranked song for 1985, selling a little over 160,000 records. Harada made her first appearance on the Kohaku Utagassen that year singing this one.
Brilliant song, one of my favorites from Tomoyo. All of her 1980s records are great... I see them as somewhat of a pinnacle of slightly-arty aidoru music.
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ReplyDeleteHave a listen to some of the late 80s aidoru stuff as well. The arrangers have sometimes had great fun playing with the melodies there as well.
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