![]() If you’re anything like me, nowadays that can happen all the time. Coming across something unexpectedly excellent – something that makes you change your mind about an artist you’d previously dismissed entirely – used to be a rare pleasure. Even workaday talents might pull three minutes of spectacular out of the bag in a way that just couldn’t happen amongst novelists (for example). Pop is a democratic form, probably the most democratic art form. One of pop music’s chief pleasures is the song you really love by an artist you otherwise have no real use for. But the rest constitute 99% of all the artists who have ever made records, and to convince yourself that none of them ever managed to release any really amazing music because they didn’t do it at album length, repeatedly, well, that’s looking at pop all wrong. The only real beef I have with a Mojo-style pop music canon is that it tends to construct its narrative around a smallish group – Sinatra, Presley, Beatles, Stones, Brian Wilson, Lou Reed, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Smiths, etc. Way early on in the life of this blog I wrote about the idea of a canon of pop music and the unintended effects that the propagation of this canon by music media might have. Hopefully she never tried anything too desperate and dropped the pilotor charmed that snake. It’s a consciously adult sound and probably would not have sold many records after the mid-eighties, but reaching too far outside their comfort zones in a bid to stay relevant rarely did veteran artists any favours. A shame, since her songs and voice were matched well with this type of arrangement. From some fishing around on youtube, it seems that the production of her records tended to shift with the times (perhaps lagging slightly behind fashions in US and UK record making, as we have observed of Night Walker). I played the song to my friend Yo Zushi one evening after a recording session, and he confirmed something I’d read about her online, that her understated and unshowy voice is rather unusual for a Japanese female singer, among whom it’s more usual to adopt a cutesy, coquettish tone or emote more stridently. The sound of Matsutoya’s voice is the central appeal of this for me, as it must be when the language barrier prevents me understanding what she sings. For all their longevity, Scaggs and McDonald haven’t sold 42 million albums. Few managed the transition in the US or UK as well as Matsutoya did in Japan. In 1983, smoothness – as exemplified by Scaggs, Kenny Loggins (pre- Footloose and post-Messina), Michael McDonald and so on – was out and the old guard were having to modernise to retain their careers as hitmakers. ![]() It’s a startlingly accurate take on a form of pop music that was just beginning to recede in popularity at the song’s parent album, Reincarnation, was released. ![]() That is to say, it was a live-and-in-the-wild Japanese take on yacht rock. The use of the orchestra suggest the influence of Barry Gibbs’s production work on Barbra Streisand’s Guilty, the steady mid-tempo rhythm suggests Fleetwood Mac (as does the use of the heartbeat kick drum pattern made ubiquitous by Fleetwood’s use of it on Dreams), there’s a bit of Boz Scaggs in there in the electric piano and soul-derived guitar licks – everything about it signified LA around 1979. Sophisticated, though, I’d have agreed with. It’s a very close take, too, but I’m not sure how the ILM poster heard this and thought, “Hmm, yes, jazzy”. I’d never heard of Yumi Matsutoya, but I was intrigued to listen to a Japanese take on a Western form. Someone posted asking for recommendations for songs by jazz-inflected singer-songwriters I guess they were thinking of stuff in the vein of Paul Simon’s late-seventies work. I first heard this song when reading a thread on the I Love Music message board. Compare that to the commercial fortunes of her western equivalents (even artistic and one-time commercial giants like Joni Mitchell and Carole King) in the same span of time and the scale of those achievements becomes clear. She continues to have hits, and to write them for other artists. She’s sold 42 million records and was the first artist to notch up two million sales in Japan for an album. ![]() Yumi Matsutoya (born Yumi Arai, and known to her fans as Yuming) has been one of the biggest stars of Japanese pop music for forty years, having released her first single in 1972, aged 18.
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