Seishiro Kusunose -- Eien no Yakusoku (永遠の約束)

Link here.   (excerpt only)

  Those horns! This song never fails to reawaken my love for summer, despite the hellish heat of it here in Gifu City, Japan. It's just so bright and optimistic with some action-packed arrangement. And then there's Seishiro Kusunose's (楠瀬誠志郎) crystal-clear vocals that just seamlessly glide and soar above the song. Today, I finally had a chance to access the digital versions of the CDs I left back home in Toronto via cloud storage and immediately leaped to Kusunose's 1990 album "Itsumo Aeru Wake janai kara" (いつも逢えるわけじゃないから), since it was one of my jams from Canada summer 2012. "Eien no Yakusoku" (永遠の約束) is the opening track from that album. I still associate it with those speedy drives through Gardiner Expressway while CN Tower and Lake Ontario come into view and hot wind blows through the car windows, though now I may want to give it a spin while approaching the sea on a train or a highway bus. Either way, my brain gets filled with bright shades of blue and green whenever I listen to this, as evident in the Youtuber's choice of photos in the video above.

As for Kusunose, he started off as an apprentice for Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami during his student years and later became a singer for Masamichi Sugi's backing chorus group The Dreamers. He released his first solo album as a singer-songwriter, "Takarajima" (宝島), in 1986. I don't have the Japanese City Pop book with me at the moment, but I distinctly remember the review for "Takarajima" describing him as having pop sensibility that matches that of Happy End and Tatsuro Yamashita. Though in my opinion he may not have the overall genius of those two acts, he has produced some mighty enjoyable tunes. I believe his most well-known hit is "Hottokenai yo" from 1991. After his first two albums he moved away from straight City Pop towards the airy version of it, but the roots still remained there as you can hear in "Eien no Yakusoku". He hasn't recorded anything since 2001 and instead decided to focus on his vocal training studio Breavo-para. I did, however, watch a recent video of him performing "Hottokenai yo" in a concert and was amazed at how well he preserved that voice of his over the years despite aging quite a bit on the outside.