Not an album I own on vinyl, but I do have it on CD somewhere…

The song is Ondo no Funauta (音戸の舟唄; trans. “Ondo Boat Song” ), a fishing song from Hiroshima as sung by pop singer Hitomi Shimatani (島谷ひとみ). It appeared on her album Sign Music.

TL;DR: Japanese pop singer who started off as a folk singer returns to her folk roots and it’s very very pretty.

Context

She’s had a very long career on one of Japan’s largest labels, avex trax. After winning a nationwide singing contest as a high schooler in 1997, she got a recording contract with avex as an enka singer (think blues mixed with Japanese folk; this is important for later), but quickly pivoted to pop when that first single didn’t even chart. She released several popular albums and singles (one of which, Amairo no Kami no Otome (亜麻色の髪の乙女; trans. “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”), became a huge hit and a Japanese karaoke staple), but eventually fell into relative obscurity as pop singers over the age of 30 tend to do.

She released various cover albums and “mom pop” songs from 2008 to 2013, an era that culminated in 2012 with the release of Sign Music: an album of nursery rhymes and folk songs produced by Jazztronik, a fairly prominent electronic jazz producer. Despite his pedigree, the album had no electronics and very little in the way of jazz. It was also quite baffling for the three international fans she had left, including me. Regardless, the nursery rhyme recordings are very musically interesting, and the folk song recordings are quite well-done.

The Song

The above-linked song immediately captured my attention when I heard it. It actually was hard to find when the album first came out because it was a bonus track on the CD-Only version of the album (Japan often had (has?) multiple versions of albums with varying numbers of DVDs attached), which was weirdly more rare than the CD+DVD version. It starts with her voice alone for the first line, after which a jazzy piano accompaniment comes in.

I was transfixed because, 13 years after she released her first and last enka single, she whips out a traditional singing style that you would only hear in enka or true Japanese folk music. She stays delicate throughout the whole song, and definitely keeps an inflection somewhere between a pop song and lullaby, but the beautiful melisma and wide vibrato are full display. It feels at once calming, nostalgic, and bittersweet, and hasn’t left my mind since. It was really my immediate thought when I saw this thread.

pls enjoy and sorry for writing so much