GLAY -- Winter, again

"Winter....again?" It's a common utterance by we folks in Toronto around this time whenever we get a major snowfall. The Holidays have long passed us but we're still several weeks away from spring and even then, there is no guarantee that warmer days and no shoveling of the white stuff will have arrived by March 21st. Strangely enough, though, as I am writing this, we have been going through an unusual short spell of warm weather so that very little of the snow remains...although what is left appears like gray/black globs.

Ah, my first paragraph was merely to introduce another big GLAY hit, "Winter, again" from February 1999. And this was a huge success for the rock band fronted by TERU. It not only hit No. 1 for 2 consecutive weeks but it was the 2nd-ranked single for 1999, only beaten by a trio of dough balls. In fact, "Winter, again" is currently the 59th-ranked single in Oricon history. In terms of sales, it is the band's biggest hit, selling approximately 1.65 million copies. The song is also included on GLAY's 5th album, "Heavy Gauge" from October 1999. This was also another huge hit, hitting No. 1 on the weekly charts, becoming the No. 8 album of the year, and currently 50th place in terms of the top albums in Oricon history.

I'd known about this song for years but not being a GLAY fan, I had never really listened to it in its entirety until recently. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, though, I finally heard it and saw the video of the guys performing in the middle of a winter wonderland (or endurance challenge, depending on how long they had to stay out there), and actually realized that it was a pretty decent song especially during the refrain.

The words and music were created by guitarist/keyboardist TAKURO and although the lyrics talk of a man waxing philosophical about his own snow-covered hometown and wanting to show his significant other (who may be temporarily or permanently parted from him), the music makes me think of a Canadian police procedural show that has been getting some success recently, "Cardinal".

Instead, it became the cool jingle for Japan Railways. One other interesting trivia tidbit that I got from the J-Wiki article (although I couldn't find the original source for this information, I found out that this info has been making the rounds on other sites remarking on the song) was that TAKURO had based the delicate intro on the opening to the massive hit theme song from "Titanic", "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion.

Ironically, although GLAY did make an appearance on the Kohaku Utagassen that year (their final time of 3 times), they didn't perform "Winter, again" but instead it was a tune called "Survival" which was also included on "Heavy Gauge". Maybe they couldn't do an adequate job without all of the snow around them? But then again, Saburo Kitajima（北島三郎）was still appearing on the Kohaku...couldn't NHK have lent the guys some of that billowing paper snow?

GLAY -- DEATHTOPIA/Chouonsoku Destiny （超音速デスティニー）

One anime this year that has gone the double-season route is "Kuromukuro" (クロムクロ...The Black Relic) which was produced by the company P.A.Works. Along with some of the more gentler anime that my buddy and I have been watching, this mecha anime set at Kurobe Dam, has been providing the action-packed side of things for the past several months in tandem with "Active Raid". It doesn't get more anime than giant robots dueling during the Tokugawa Era with a formerly-frozen-now-revived samurai driving the title robot with a reluctant high school girl who looks somewhat like the princess he was protecting hundreds of years ago.

I didn't warm to "Kuromukuro" immediately but as the first season progressed, I began becoming more invested in the characters and the story of the admittedly done-to-death alien invasion. One of the surprises for me was that GLAY took care of both of the opening theme songs. Of course, GLAY isn't the first rock band to provide anison but I think for a lot of fans and folks who weren't, this was indeed one of the biggest bands actually creating and performing an anime tune for the first time.

The first theme song "DEATHTOPIA" struck me as being pretty hardcore for an anime that takes place in the sylvan glades of Toyama Prefecture, but hey, it packs a punch as powerful as an attack by the Kuromukuro mecha itself. The above video has shortened versions of both it and the second opening theme song, "Chouonsoku Destiny". And I think the music video for "DEATHTOPIA" has got a good handle on what the title is all about.

Here is the first opening for "DEATHTOPIA" which was written and composed by guitarist HISASHI.

And this is the full version.

I actually like the second opening theme "Chouonsoku Destiny" (Supersonic Speed Destiny) better than the first GLAY foray into anime simply because the band here sounds like early Anzen Chitai（安全地帯）to me (and both bands do hail from Hokkaido). "Chouonsoku Destiny" was also created by HISASHI and is the second song on the "DEATHTOPIA" disc which was released last month in August as the band's 54th single. Not only has the song been the opener for this anime for the past several weeks, but it was also the ending theme to an Internet news program, AbemaPrime.

Here is the original recorded full version for "Chouonsoku Destiny". "DEATHTOPIA", by the way, peaked at No. 6 on the Oricon weeklies. The show is just about to reach the climax with a few more weeks left so I'm anticipating that "Kuromukuro" will end with a huge bang....hopefully with Kurobe Dam intact.

GLAY -- BE WITH YOU

I remember watching at least some of a particular Fuji-TV drama in the late 1990s titled "Tabloid" which featured an intrepid reporter played by Takako Tokiwa（常盤貴子）who gets unceremoniously dumped from a big newspaper into a cheap rag for delving a little too much into the sordid goings-on of an official at the Ministry of Finance. The show did the usual "fish-out-of-water" hijinks for poor Tokiwa but in the course of the series, she manages to latch onto a juicy story involving a chef being accused of murder played by Hiroyuki Sanada (真田広之...who has since gone Hollywood).

There is not much that I remember from "Tabloid" outside of the large number of famous actors populating the show, but there is the theme song that was performed by GLAY, "BE WITH YOU". Released in November 1998 as the band's 15th single, the song was more in the pop-rock vein of things with guitarist TAKURO taking care of words and music. From what I could understand from the lyrics, the song seems to be about making things right again between a couple. Perhaps the same could be said about the characters played by Tokiwa and Sanada, although in the show, it's more about making things right about their own individual lives.

"BE WITH YOU" hit No. 1 for 2 consecutive weeks and ultimately became the 8th-ranked single of 1999, breaking the million barrier.  It was also a track on GLAY's 5th original album, "Heavy Gauge" from October 1999. As well, it hit No. 1 and was also the No. 8 album of the year, selling more than 2 million copies.

GLAY -- HOWEVER

I always find it thoroughly amusing to hear renditions of mainstream J-Pop songs by Enka singers since they usually pleasantly surprise me by how well they can pull it off. Sometimes, they may even shed their "Enka-ness" and sound completely different from when they sing songs from their respective genre. There is a series of albums that go by "Enka no Chikara" (エンカのチカラ... Power of Enka) that gives me my fill of that. All the tracks listed in these albums are J-Pop/Kayokyoku hits from different decades (depending on the album) and are sung by the likes of Hiroshi Itsuki (五木ひろし) and Sayuri Ishikawa (石川さゆり). So far, through the wonders of the music163 website and the homepage of "Enka no Chikara", the most jaw-dropping covers I have heard of are Itsuki's "Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana" (世界に一つだけの花... This one partially blew my mind. And I'm probably being biased, but I like his version best), Takashi Hosokawa's (細川たかし) "Julia ni Heartbreak"(ジュリアに傷心... I prefer Hosokawa's version too. There's just more kick to it with his powerful vocals), Harumi Miyako's "ZUTTO" (She sounded so... so... unrecognizable...! Mind blown to infinity) and of course, Kiyoshi Maekawa's (前川清) "Choo Choo Train" (I have now seen everything) and the song I'll be writing about today, "HOWEVER". Man, this guy never fails to impress me... :)

I found Maekawa's version (21/6/2015)

Anyway, I saw Maekawa's version of GLAY's hit while scrolling through the track list for "Enka no Chikara Saikyo Z White" (エンカのチカラ 最強Z ホワイト) on the album's site. They had indicated the names of the original singers by the side, and my interest piqued when I saw the "GLAY", a rock band, beside Mae-Kiyo's name. "He can sing rock too?!" was the first thing that entered my head, so with a skeptic smile on my face, I went ahead to check "HOWEVER" out on YouTube to see what I could be in for. Contrary to what I had anticipated, "HOWEVER" was not one of those crazy-loud rock songs with screaming, for that I'm very thankful. Instead, it was easy on the ears. Composed (and written) by the band's guitarist TAKURO, the electric guitar was not overpowering, blending in well with the synths and piano, and I liked it immediately on my first listen. I found TERU's vocal delivery pretty cool too.

"HOWEVER" was released as GLAY's 12th single on 6th August 1997 and it did really well, staying at 1st place for 5 weeks (last 2 weeks in August, other 3 weeks in September) before securing its spot in the Top 10 at 9th position by the end of the year. It also managed make the band the Grand Prix winners at the 30th Japan Cable Awards, got them the bronze prize at the 16th JASRAC Awards, their first ticket to the Kohaku in 1997 and was their first-ever million seller out of 6. Wow, impressive. Then the drama "Ryukudaai Abunai Onna" (略奪愛・アブない女) used "HOWEVER" as its ending theme - TAKURO was actually in charge of the music for that show.

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Y'know, I think I'll get that "Enka no Chikara" album. Really want to hear the full Mae-Kiyo version of this song. You can find some of these covers on music163.com and some on YouTube, by the way, if you're interested in listening to them.

GLAY -- Yuuwaku （誘惑）

"Because....I....love....you!"

It may be one of the noticeable lines from GLAY's megahit "Yuuwaku" (Temptation), but it's probably also something that was in the heads of thousands of rabid fans at the time when it came to how they felt about their heroes. The band GLAY was an oft-heard topic of conversation amongst the younger of my students, especially on the female side of things in the late 90s going into the 21st century. Squeals of "Ka-ko-iiiiiiiiii" were not uncommon in my classroom.

"Yuuwaku" was the band's 13th single since their official debut in 1994, and like SMAP's "Yozora no Mukou" (夜空ノムコウ...which was the No. 2 song of the year on Oricon), the official video for the song or excerpts from it were another frequent fixture on the ranking shows for all of that year. As soon as I hear the crashing guitars and see the rotating stage and the slinky model in purple, I know which video it is. It was released in April 1998 and never looked back as it became the No. 1 song of the year. GLAY guitarist and keyboardist TAKURO was behind its creation....a creation that eventually earned more than 1.6 million in sales. "Yuuwaku" also got onto their hit 4th album, "pure soul".

GLAY made its way onto the Kohaku Utagassen, their second appearance on the New Year's Eve special after debuting there the year before with "However". My memories of that Kohaku are a bit hazy but I just hope they didn't follow a female enka singer....the contrast would've blown out the ears of some of the older folk in the audience.

As for the band members, they are: TERU (vocals), TAKURO (guitar), JIRO (bass) and HISASHI (guitar). Like some of the most popular bands in Japanese pop music history, GLAY came from Hokkaido...the city of Hakodate, to be exact. The band started life during high school and gained local prominence as an amateur act before they decided to strike it big in Tokyo. Although they went through some lean years in the nation's capital, "Yuuwaku" reinforced (the band had already started getting their hits by that point) its status as one of Japan's top pop-rock bands at the end of the century.

The one thing about the band that had scratching my head for a while was how they got their name. Well, the Wikipedia article on GLAY will answer that more effectively without me needing to paraphrase. Just look for "3. Name".