Yumi Arai
Posted By BillHeise on February 18, 2011
I’m way behind on my work this week, so here’s a Beach Boys inspired song from Japanese superstar Yumi Arai, aka Yumi Matsutoya. It’s called Rouge no Dengon ["Lipstick Message" in English]:
While you’re listening, you can read about Yumi here. But if not, here are the salient facts:
She has had 21 #1 albums on the Oricon charts.
In 1989, her fifth single “Rouge no Dengon” and another song, “Yasashisa ni Tsutsumaretanara” (from her second album), were featured as the theme songs of the film Kiki’s Delivery Service. Nowadays, those tunes are known as her early notable songs. Some of her songs were deeply influenced by many American and European musicians, such as Joni Mitchell and Carole King. As a pioneering singer-songwriter who mixed Western culture and Japanese pop, she left a strong impression on Japanese popular music. Today, many music critics in Japan consider that her works as Yumi Arai were her peak as a musician.
If you haven’t seen Kiki’s Delivery Service, it’s a charming story about a young witch who leaves her house to go off on her first adventure. She meets a boy and starts a delivery service (it’s more charming than it sounds in my description).
Here’s one more from Yumi. This one’s called Raga #3:
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