A Weekend Close to the Sky, Played on a Road Dappled with Sunlight | The Beautiful Melodies of Akemi Kakihara
I love "A Weekend Close to the Sky" by Akemi Kakihara, which is famous for Miki Imai's vocal performance.
It was originally released as a B-side to Miki Imai's single "Boogie-Woogie Lonesome High-Heel." While the Miki Imai version is a wonderful performance, in our home, we listen to Akemi Kakihara's version overwhelmingly more.
This CD, with its striking pale blue jacket, contains self-covered recordings of songs Akemi Kakihara provided to Miki Imai, specifically those that were highly requested.
I bought this CD at a used record store in Nagoya when I was a freshman in high school.
I think I first heard it on the radio or somewhere similar, but I believe it is a masterpiece where the gentle melodies and vocals throughout the entire CD put one's mind at ease.
That said, I haven't been listening to this "A Weekend Close to the Sky" continuously since I was in high school. About 12 or 13 years ago, I suddenly remembered it while selecting music for my car stereo as usual, and I added it to my car's library.
My car stereo has over 5,000 songs on it, and it is always set to shuffle. It can be anything from Manuel Göttsching's "E2-E4" playing for an hour straight, to the theme song of "Apache Baseball Team" suddenly creating an intense minute and a half.
I have written about that slightly insane car stereo a few times before, but I still clearly remember the moment when "A Weekend Close to the Sky" played.
It was around 2013, when the heat wasn't as severe as it is now.
We went for a drive to the northern part of Hyogo Prefecture as a family, looking for a "very long slide" that my daughter wanted to visit. When we were driving on a local road where the sunlight dappled through the fresh green leaves, the song suddenly came on, and I remember being so moved that I was brought to tears and repeated it twice.
Since then, I have even gone so far as to copy and add the same song file about 10 times to my car stereo to forcibly increase the "shuffle selection probability" of this track.
Thanks to that, it has become a standard song in our home, and occasionally, when we enjoy karaoke on the Switch at home, my wife and daughter will sometimes sing it.
Whenever Miki Imai appears on TV shows like SONGS, I always think, "I wonder if she'll sing this song?" but it has never happened.
The composer, Akemi Kakihara, shifted toward more electronic-leaning work under the name "AK" around the year 2000, and she is currently the partner of the legendary New York DJ, Danny Krivit. Even though I know it's a wish that will never come true, I still have a feeling that I would have liked to see her live as a "pop songwriter" from that era at least once.
Finally, I found a video of her TV performance from that time on YouTube.
Please, do listen to this gentle atmosphere.
Perhaps it was this NHK broadcast that I heard for the first time.
...No, wait, we didn't have BS at home back then.