Yuri Sato -- Lonely Girl（ロンリー・ガール）

 

I only discovered this particular song within the last day or so, but it's interesting when I encounter a phenomenon where two totally different songs of the same title get released within a couple of months of each other.

The song in question is "Lonely Girl". I remember the title track from Junko Yagami's（八神純子）February 1983 album with the same name which was this mid-tempo introspective City Pop tune. Now I've come across this "Lonely Girl" which was released as the sophomore single of Yuri Sato（佐東由梨）only a couple of months later in April 1983. Listening to this one, I'd also wondered if this could also fall under the City Pop umbrella but aside from an urbane intro and a sharp horn section, Sato's "Lonely Girl" is more of an especially funky strut aidoru tune. The song also had some of the big songwriting powerhouses behind it: lyricist Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）, composer Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）and arranger Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）.

However, the song didn't make any sort of dent...it actually reached No. 186 on Oricon (I wasn't aware that Oricon would broadcast songs scoring that low), and unfortunately for Sato, her singing career was limited to just four singles from November 1982 to December 1983. Believe it or not, according to her J-Wiki article, one reason for the fact that she never really caught fire within the music zeitgeist may have been partly due to her hair. She had just won the Miss Seventeen contest (sponsored by the teen magazine "Seventeen") which led to her path into music and opted to have her hair cut really short into something rather boyish, but with the fandom going gaga at the time over fellow aidoru Seiko Matsuda's（松田聖子）famous Seiko-chan cut, Sato didn't really garner much interest. By the time she grew it out again (to resemble more of a Seiko-chan cut), it was the time of her fourth and final single and the writing was probably on the wall. She would retire from the geinokai after March 1984.