Junko Yagami -- Lonely Girl (album)

 

I'm always happy to start off Urban Contemporary Fridays on KKP, but today is especially auspicious since I'm going to begin with an album of the genre that I'd been searching for years. Yup, it was the odyssey of tracking down Junko Yagami's（八神純子）"Lonely Girl" from February 1983. For the longest time, it seems, the album had been discontinued although many of the singer-songwriter's other releases were available. But then, several days ago, out of a sense of whimsy, I tried out Amazon.jp and lo and behold, there were a few copies of "Lonely Girl" on sale. Well, I wasn't a lonely boy anymore. The air crackled over my keyboard as I whipped out my credit card and fingers and had that sucker sailing over the Pacific and much of Canada to my home. 

It arrived, I listened to it and I'm a happy man. Mind you, out of the ten tracks, I've already covered half the album through individual articles on the title track itself, the theme for the anime feature "Final Yamato" "Love Supreme", "Yozora no Earring"（夜空のイヤリング）, "Touch you, tonight" and my favourite track on "Lonely Girl", the bouncy City Pop classic "Jealous". I found out through the liner notes that Ichizo Seo（瀬尾一三）had arranged the entire album and that Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）along with Etsuko Yamakawa（山川恵津子）helped out on the chorus including "Jealous". Also note that unless mentioned otherwise, the songs which all revolve around some aspect of love were written and composed by Yagami.

The folded booklet containing the lyrics is made out as a particularly expensive letter (well, those are a lot of stamps there). It isn't everyday that you get to see a smiling Junko so please enjoy one of the stamps. Anyways, without further ado:

Track 3 is "Kodou no Lullaby"（鼓動のララバイ...Heartbeat Lullaby） is a cool and sultry City Pop number about welcoming home a tired loved one, and without any sort of artifice such as a candlelit dinner or petals floating in a bathtub, the two happily engage in a cuddle in bed (how much clothing they're wearing, I'll leave to your imagination). The Joe Group strings and Masahiro Kobayashi's（小林正弘）fluegelhorn do wonders to take a very intimate experience and have it soaring into the night sky.

The final track on Side A of the original LP is "Moetsukiru made"（燃えつきるまで...Until It Burns Out） shows off why I'm often so in awe of Yagami with those incredible vocals of hers. They were what got me interested in her in the first place and I was given a good reminder of that here. Nice beefy bass by Kenji Takamizu（高水健司）and keyboard work by Maki Yajima（矢嶋マキ）. It's another night sky ballad.

Side A may have finished with a whisper but Side B explodes with cheerful thoughts via a good battery of horns including those manned by Shin Kazuhara（数原晋）and Jake H. Concepcion. There's something rather happily Stevie Wonder about this funk and strut "And I Love You". Just enjoy the stride down Shinjuku as you listen to this one. Keisuke Yamakawa（山川啓介）provided the lyrics.

The penultimate track is "You & I", another huggable love ballad which is arguably the most straight-ahead pop song of "Lonely Girl". Yamakawa and Matsushita provide a bit more in the chorus and Yagami sounds downright adorable whispering the last few syllables every other line at the end. It's quite short but it feels the right length.

The final track is "Falling For You" which has Yagami showing off those soaring vocals and has more of a feeling of Boz Scaggs or Bobby Caldwell. Tsuyoshi Kon（今剛）, who shows up in many of the tracks, has another epic solo and those electric guitar solos have often popped up in those 80s Japanese love songs. I can't also ignore the piano which starts and ends the ballad along with the Joe Group strings once more.

Unfortunately, I didn't get this song with my copy of "Lonely Girl" but apparently for the 2003 re-release of the album, there was a bonus track included as mentioned on J-Wiki. "Sono Mune ni Mou Ichido"（その胸にもう一度...Once More Into These Arms）. Written by Yagami and composed/arranged by the late Hiroshi Narumi（鳴海寛）of Tohoku Shinkansen（東北新幹線）, this is some pleasant Latin-infused sunset City Pop with a hint of disco and maybe even Herb Alpert. If you have the 2003 version of "Lonely Girl", consider yourself lucky...apparently "Sono Mune ni Mou Ichido" hasn't shown up anywhere else unless someone tells me otherwise.