One thing I loved about Google Play Music, before Google killed that service, was that it was ridiculously easy to find new musicians similar to ones you already enjoyed. This is possible with Apple Music, my current music streaming service, but it’s not great in terms of how you have to find the recommendations and I don’t much care for the quality of its recommendations once I do find them.
To that end, here are some artists I’ve managed to forget about until I rediscovered them on Apple Music by going through old playlists – or by digging through music curated by Apple.
Rachael Yamagata
Thinking about Yamagata’s smoky, sultry voice is actually what gave me the idea to write this blog entry. I discovered Rachael Yamagata in 2015 with her splendid 2008 album Elephants… Teeth Sinking Into Heart, although after exploring her discography, her earlier stuff meets with more approval on my part. I liked her 2016 album Tightrope Walker well enough, but it wasn’t as compelling as Happenstance, Elephants, or Chesapeake for me. My must-listen deep cut of hers is “1963:”
I found a CD copy of Happenstance, Yamagata’s first album, for $1 at my local used media seller. A shame: I’d have paid full price for it had I found it new.
Vanessa Carlton
I dearly loved Vanessa Carlton’s first three albums when I was in college. I will admit that Harmonium, her second album, had to grow on me a bit, but once it did, boy what a trio of albums it was. Heroes & Thieves, Carlton’s third album, was a commercial flop (but somehow, I managed to acquire two copies, one of which is in its original shrink wrap) but her most solid early work from a musical and lyrical standpoint.
Of course, most people remember Vanessa Carlton for this, the song that unjustly made her a one-hit wonder:
“A Thousand Miles” is enough of a bop that Generation Z seems to be rather into this song: coming home one afternoon, I heard a child of nine or ten singing the song out loud while they rode on their electric scooter – something that makes me feel tremendously old since I was close to that kid’s age when this song came out. There’s more to her music career (and even more to her debut album, Be Not Nobody) than this one track, and I hate that she ended up only being a one-hit wonder.
In fact, the last time I recall hearing Carlton’s music in public, in the form of a song that wasn’t “A Thousand Miles,” was in an on-campus convenience store at the University of Tennessee in 2008 – the dynamite “Hands On Me,” one of the singles from Heroes & Thieves.
Tove Lo
Modern mainstream pop really isn’t my thing. I’m not the biggest fan of electronic music (very few musicians get it right), I’m past the age of understanding mainstream pop culture (and when I was in the target demographic, I didn’t understand it any better), and a lot of the songs just doesn’t interest me on a lyrical or musical level.
There’s one notable exception: the second album by Swedish pop singer Tove Lo. Titled Lady Wood and released in 2016, it’s a concept album dedicated to exploring sexuality and relationships in an unashamed, empowered, and yet non-vulgar way (despite the Parental Advisory sticker, seeing as this record does have a bit in the way of obscene language and mature themes). Every song on the album is a gem, though my favourites are “True Disaster,” “Imaginary Friend,” “WTF Love Is,” and “Influence,” the lattermost of which is a collab with Wiz Khalifa – and Khalifa’s rapping adds appreciably to the track.
Lady Wood came out in 2016 and has proven to be the only Tove Lo album I’ve had any sustained interest in aside from the deep cut “Got Love” from her first album Queen of the Clouds.
Mariya Takeuchi (and city pop in general)
I got into city pop last year. For those unfamiliar, city pop is a subgenre of Japanese pop music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s and lasted into the early 1990s, fusing elements of American-style pop, R&B, soft rock, funk, and groove music with Japanese vocals. The genre emerged as Japan’s economy began its meteoric rise in the 1980s, and to this day in Japan the sound is associated with the ’80s much like new wave, synth pop, and hair metal are associated with the decade in the West. City pop faded from popularity with the decline of the Japanese economy in the recession of the early 1990s.
City pop is tricky to find in the West; despite a small yet dedicated fanbase, artists like Tatsuro Yamashita, Mariya Takeuchi, Miki Matsubara, Anri, Taeko Ohnuki, and many others have only limited availability on Western streaming services. (Meiko Nakahara, one of my personal favourites, is completely MIA from Apple Music. I don’t use Spotify or YouTube Music, but I can’t imagine they have the rights if Apple doesn’t.) Practically none of Yamashita’s best-known works are available on iTunes, while Takeuchi’s and Matsubara’s works are scattershot as regards availability. The availability of these artists is better than it once was, although this phenomenon is well-known to anyone who listens to music from a foreign country – I’ve experienced this exact issue with music from France, Belgium, and French Canada, where albums from those regions often have uneven and at-times precarious distribution rights in the US. (As a fluent French speaker for twenty years, music performed in the language is a substantial part of how I maintain my fluency. That music can be tricky to find on American streaming services, even on YouTube (and you can find damn near anything there!).)
Saburō Kitajima (and the broader genres of enka and kayōkyoku)
Enka (演歌) is a form of kayōkyoku (歌謡曲), the Japanese term for popular music. Enka combines Western musical forms from a variety of genres, chiefly blues and rock n’ roll, with traditional Japanese scales and instrumentation. The combination of the two genres distils traditional Japanese culture into an alluring mix of emotively delivered vocals and captivating instrumentation. Enka was mostly popular during the ’60s and ’70s, although the genre persists today, and while it is primarily performed by Japanese singers, there have been successful enka singers from outside Japan – Kye EunSook and Kim Yonja from Korea, Teresa Teng from Taiwan1The queen of Asian pop. She performed in numerous languages including Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Indonesian, and even English. My favourite by her is “愛人” (“Aijin (Mistress)”). Teng was able to cross cultural and political divides with her music, even earning a measure of popularity in mainland China despite popular music being illegal there during the height of her career. Teng’s popularity in Japan was especially surprising given the history between Japan and Taiwan, particularly Japan’s colonisation of the island between 1895 and 1945., and our very own Jero2True story: I had no idea Jero wasn’t Japanese until I saw the album art for his single “海雪” (“Umiyuki (Ocean Snow)”). He seamlessly blended hip-hop stylings with traditional enka sounds and themes while he was active in the Japanese music scene – two great tastes that, it turns out, taste surprisingly good together (as it were). (the stage name of Jerome White, a Pittsburgh native who withdrew from the entertainment industry in 2018). Enka occupies a similar cultural niche to the blues and country in the US, the genre being rich with ballads about love, loss, and traditional livelihoods and customs. The song “北の漁場” (“Kita no Ryouba (Northern Fishing Grounds)”), for example, is a classic by Saburō Kitajima about the fishing industry, which is of great cultural importance to many Japanese (occupying a similar niche in the island nation to the cattlemen of the American West and the gentleman farmers of the American heartland more broadly). As is the case in many countries, Japan has many festivals of great cultural importance, which in the language are called matsuri (祭), and Kitajima gloriously celebrates the tradition of matsuri in his eponymous song, perhaps his best-known performance outside Japan.
Kitajima himself is in his eighties now, but as recently as last year he was still releasing new material. He is justifiably considered a legend of enka, one of the greatest artists in the history of the Japanese recording industry. Japan is a notoriously fickle country when it comes to entertainment – but Kitajima’s popularity endures. For what it’s worth, I adore Saburō Kitajima and his music – I think of him as the king of enka, the one all the other men in the genre aspired to be like. Watching live shows he put on as late as 2007 shows me that Kitajima still had a way of captivating and electrifying the crowd with his music – and that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day.
For my part, enka is rekindling the passion I once had for the Japanese language. I have listened to a few songs enough that I can kind of sing along (but believe me, you do not want to hear me sing) and I’m going to get back into my Japanese materials for the first time since college later this year (once I make the time to go through my storage locker and find them).