Megumi Hirota -- Just My Love

 

Megumi Hirota（広田恵）is one of those singers whose online presence in terms of basic information is incredibly small. At this point, I just have one album, "Gray", from 1991 represented via the track "Senaka Awase no CRESCENT"（背中あわせのCRESCENT）.

Although that particular song was one that I categorized as a pop tune, I think another track, "Just My Love", has enough urban pizzazz in it that I can treat it as a City Pop song of the times. Written by Ayuko Ishikawa（石川あゆ子）and composed by Hideya Nakazaki（中崎英也）, it's got some blippy Latin percussion (to add to those synth-horns) in there as well so I did get some of those Matt Bianco vibes.

From what I could find on the Oricon website, Hirota had at least two albums including "Gray" and three singles with "Gray" being the last release.

Megumi Hirota -- Senaka Awase no CRESCENT（背中あわせのCRESCENT）

Found another one of those mystery singers with a nice song who never got detected on my sensors.

This is Megumi Hirota（広田恵）, and yep, I could find extremely little about her anywhere. Most of what I could dig up was the description for this video itself. "Senaka Awase no CRESCENT" (The Crescent Moon On My Back [?]) is from Hirota's 2nd album, "Gray", released in 1991.

Written by Goro Matsui（松井五郎）and composed by Hideya Nakazaki（中崎英也）, "Senaka Awase no CRESCENT" starts with an exotic flourish before going into a beat that I knew had to be from the late 1980s/early 1990s even before I saw the year of release. I've cottoned onto it and there's a synth solo in the middle which reminded me of Steve Winwood's 80s stuff to a certain extent. Apparently, one Twitter fan even likened "Gray" to "Style", the debut album for Keiko Kimura（木村恵子）, so that has got me rather interested in the former.

At the risk of sounding like a scriptwriter for the hilarious "Zoolander", I think I can now put my own moniker onto the sound of those synths that seemed to be de rigueur during that part of the 20th century: Cool Steel. It's the type of sound that I also heard on a lot of those old 80s action movies starring Sly Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.