Cover & Oldies: Strange foreigner

久保田早紀 - 異邦人

Okay, so this above song is not quite "indies" or "rock" or anything like that. It was a popular Japanese pop song in 1979. Don't you dig the camel? But it's also a very important song to me and I can justify it with this catchy rendition below.

Acid Black Cherry - 異邦人

Genre: pop-rock
Song style: old school Japanese pop with an electronic twist, somewhat androgynous vocals

I first heard the original 異邦人 when my mom bought her first CD off of Amazon Japan something like ten years ago and started blasting it on her cd player. My sister and I ran upstairs to see what the strange noise was and saw our mom dancing around and singing along to this song. My sister and I started imitating the dance and had a fun and bizarre night. This was our first ever exposure to Japanese music. For the longest time after that night, we thought our mom had some strange hidden history as a Japanese popstar.

Ten years later, my sister and I got into this band "Acid Black Cherry" for their catchy single "Black Cherry" (which I will post soon!). It really surprised us when we discovered their cd "Recreation" (2008) which features solely covers of old, nostalgic Japanese pop tunes. I really give props to Acid Black Cherry for continuing a modern tradition of Japanese pop-rock but not forgetting its roots.

It seems like this is a popular song to cover, too. If you would like to hear a more truthful rendition but with extra guitars, check out this cover below featuring Tak Matsumoto and Zard. Matsumoto is lead guitarist of popular pop-rock band B'z (which doesn't quite fit my tastes so might not make it on here...) and Zard was a female singer who unfortunately recently passed away from cancer.

Tak Matsumoto of B'z & Zard - 異邦人

So with all these songs of foreign romance, hope you all have exciting and mysterious weekends!