Credits

I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Kaya Saeki -- Perfume wo Nokosenai/Hitomi de Sasayaite (パフュームを残せない・瞳で囁いて)




I just came across this one purely by accident while I was browsing through YouTube looking for a song by another singer. I'd never heard of Kaya Saeki(佐伯伽耶)but when I heard her debut single "Perfume wo Nokosenai" (Can't Leave Any Perfume), I was quickly hooked. To be honest, I thought that Saeki had done this in the 80s just from how it sounded but it actually came out in October 1994. I've always been a bit of a sucker for Latin/AOR when it came from singers like Keiko Maruyama(丸山圭子)or Ruiko Kurahashi(倉橋ルイ子), and Saeki seems to be into that sort of music.


According to J-Wiki, she was scouted while she was working in a Ginza nightclub as a pianist and entered show business in 1992. As well as entering the music industry, Saeki had a stint as an actress, but both aspects of her time in the geinokai were pretty short apparently. She only released 4 singles (no albums) between late 1994 and 1997 before calling it a day. For "Perfume wo Nokosenai", it was written by Yasushi Akimoto (the AKB 48 maestro) and composed by Chika Ueda (who had also helped on a lot of Miki Imai's songs in the early part of her career). The song certainly has that champagne-at-a-soiree feeling to it. The song was also used as the ending theme for a rather esoteric late-night show on Fuji-TV called "Rooms" that was on during the mid to late 90s. I used to catch it a fair bit before getting my shuteye since I also liked the ending themes such as one by Kaoru Nakahara(中原薫). And I also just came across another "Rooms" ending theme by Kenjiro Sakiya(崎谷健次郎)on YouTube that I quite like and will talk about later.


The coupling song is "Hitomi de Sasayaite" (Whisper With Your Eyes), another swooning nighttime tune to be enjoyed with a bit of that bubbly. It was actually used for a soup pasta commercial, but hey, soup pasta can be made classy, too, with a bit of garnish. The lyrics are also by Akimoto but the melody was created by Masayuki Kishi(岸正之).

The CD single went as high as No. 50 on the Oricon rankings.

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