Ole Børud -- Maybe

 

I've finished off the Yutaka Kimura Speaks file (for now) since Toshiki Kadomatsu（角松敏生）was the final person in "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" to be profiled. So, in the meantime, I'll just be going with a fifth article on any Urban Contemporary tune to finish up the Friday.

As such, why not go with someone a little different? A couple of years ago, I introduced Norwegian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Ole Børud onto the pages of "Kayo Kyoku Plus" because he just impressed me so much with his history and breadth of genres. He's totally at home with both doom metal and West Coast AOR...and I don't mean the west coast of Norway but of the United States and its old creamy soft rock from decades ago.

His 2023 "Find a Way" was just the bee's knees and a welcome and thrumming throwback to 1980s AOR. Plus the fact that he had Bill Champlin, Jay Graydon and Michael Omartian helping him out in the song and the music video firmly implanted in my mind that Børud was the real deal. I still listen to "Find a Way" when I want to fulfill that need for a jolt of happiness and energy. 

I also wanted to see what else Børud had done in the AOR part of his discography and so I found this rollicking tune from his 2014 album "Stepping Up". "Maybe" strikes me as his tribute to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, one of the musical legends that informed the overall feeling of "Stepping Up" according to his profile on Wikipedia. But the arrangement also reminds me somewhat of stuff that Bobby Caldwell had done, and so perhaps not surprisingly, I can imagine the Japanese band Sing Like Talking covering "Maybe"...maybe.

Airplay/The Manhattan Transfer -- Nothin' You Can Do About It

 

All these years, I knew about Canada's David Foster since the 1980s when he was coming up with these pop instrumentals such as "The Love Theme from St. Elmo's Fire" and "Winter Games", and also songs for acts such as Earth Wind & Fire and Kenny Loggins. Then much later, I discovered that he helped out Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）and Ami Ozaki（尾崎亜美）for their own albums. Finally, I realized that he was part of a band called Airplay that was around for just 1980. 

A Canadian songwriting legend was paired up with one of the great American guitar icons, Jay "Peg" Graydon, and according to Wikipedia, their backing band consisted of the members of Toto and other session musicians who have had their own connections to Japanese singers such as Jerry Hey and Gary Grant. This is the ultimate AOR grouping!

In the aim for total transparency, this week's Reminiscings of Youth is actually a bit of a misnomer because I never found out about Airplay or its arguably most famous track "Nothin' You Can Do About It" on their lone self-titled album when it came out in 1980. It was only within the years that I've been working on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" that I first discovered this really snazzy song via YouTube and it's been the eternal earworm ever since. For some reason, I don't ever recollect hearing "Nothin' You Can Do About It" on the radio when I was a kid, and yet it sounds like the type of song that would have gotten heavy rotational airplay (pun fully intended) considering what was being played on the stations back then. The horns and the keyboards are amazing, and who knew that Graydon could sound that good as a singer? I'm just glad that I was able to finally come across it in my older years (circa 2018) and that one song was enough for me to order the album from Amazon.

The thing is that the song created by Airplay and Steve Kipner was originally recorded by The Manhattan Transfer as a track from their 1979 "Extensions". And "Nothin' You Can Do About It" fit hand-in-glove with the Transfer's move into smooth classy pop that time. Still, when I think of the arrangement, I have to go with Airplay's cover.

I'm just lifting this brief excerpt from a 2014 interview with Graydon via Wikipedia:

Interviewer: Did you guys ever envision Airplay becoming a full-time, touring type of band? 

Graydon: David wanted to tour and I didn't. A dumb move on my part.

Well, no worries Jay! It looks like you made up for that oversight with the above performance in 1994!

I gave my compliments to Neo-AOR Norwegian singer-songwriter Ole Børud about a month ago for "Find a Way". Well, he and his band gave his own tribute to the song a year ago.

Going with the Manhattan Transfer's October 1979 release of "Extensions", what other songs were coming out in Japan at that time?

Saki Kubota -- Ihojin （異邦人）

Yellow Magic Orchestra -- Technopolis

As a PS, I also read that Foster played for the band Skylark in the early 1970s. Me, I ate at Skylark! And the crazy thing was that the manager looked like a Japanese Jay Graydon!

Ole Børud -- Find a Way

 

I've made exceptions and included Western artists even if they aren't part of the Reminiscings of Youth articles since their songs were simply so amazing. That was the case with the duo Young Gun Silver Fox because of their love of performing songs in the vein of late 70s/early 80s West Coast AOR, a genre that I've also greatly cherished over the years.

Well, here is another exception. Ole Børud is a Norwegian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer who's run the gamut of genres in his 46 years of life. His Wikipedia entry lists them as such: Children's, choral, Christian metal, contemporary Christian music, extreme metal, Gospel, hardcore punk, hymn, jazz pop, progressive metal, pop rock, R&B, soul and yacht rock. Yeah, it's that wide.

Back in 1996, Børud joined a doom metal project called Schaliach as a guitarist, bassist and drummer and they came up with the album "Sonrise" which was about as epic as metal can get.

However from 2008 onwards, Børud made a hard turn and tackled the old West Coast sound with jazz, soul and other musical influences beginning with the album "Shakin' the Ground". I knew about Japanese folk singers making the big jump into City Pop from the 1970s going into the 1980s, but Børud has trumped them.

Anyways, his latest single from April this year is "Find a Way" which absolutely floored me because it sounds so 70s/80s that I forgot that we were currently in 2023. It's that AOR! Plus, "Find a Way" is further fortified with some of the big names from that era and genre: Bill Champlin, Jay Graydon and Michael Omartian. It's such a fun song that it's given me hope that other artists along with Young Gun Silver Fox and Børud can bring back some more new examples of those sleek and smooth styles from decades past.