Hope everyone is having a good Sunday out there. Indeed, we're in the final Sunday of August and so for us in Toronto, we're in that annual zone of pop culture appreciation as Fan Expo wraps up and the hype surrounding the Toronto International Film Festival heats up over the next couple of weeks.
Commenter Brian Mitchell was asking about a singer that I hadn't heard before. Yumi Shizukusa（滴草由実）is a Kagoshima Prefecture-born singer and songwriter who also happens to be an artist and radio personality. From what I've read so far, she retired from singing about half a decade ago but had been active between 2002 and 2021. There's one song from her 2015 album "Blue" titled "All My Life" that attracted my friend's ears.
According to her J-Wiki profile, Shizukusa delved into soul, rock and pop and with "All My Life", it feels like some especially sultry R&B...perhaps with some 90s dance beats and tribal percussion. I get the vibe that I have heard it somewhere before but I can't really remember when and where, and the J-Wiki article on "Blue" doesn't specify any tie-up between "All My Life" and any anime or commercial. But from the music video, I can see that it was filmed in Odaiba by Tokyo Bay.
J-Canuck, the description of “90s dance beats and tribal percussion” isn't far off sonically at all! In a 2015 BARKS interview, Shizukusa explained that because she thought her fans associated her primarily with mid-tempo songs and ballads, she thus wanted “All my life” to present a different side of herself. Inspired partly by Jazztronik's remix work, the production incorporated tribal-house elements, trap elements, and an R&B feel. ( https://barks.jp/news/748927/ )
ReplyDeleteIn short, this is what I like about this song and the album is that it almost feels like a second debut. Shizukusa had already spent over a decade making records(and even a song for Detective Conan), yet here she deliberately discarded part of the sound people expected from her. Thank you J-Canuck for taking the time write this post!
My pleasure and I'll have to check out her earlier material since it appears that it was quite different from what I've heard for "All My Life".
Delete