Tatsuro Yamashita in 7 albums (Add Some Music, Circus Town, Spacey, Pacific etc.)

These are some of the worst covers (apart from the first and Spacy) we've seen lately on this blog. (Not at all aided by the inclusion of the artist's image.)  Musically we have here a case where a very inauspicious beginning in the first album of cover versions of Beach Boys songs led to some very nice funky but simple fusion pop in Circus and his masterpiece Spacy, then a total sell-out into commercial funky Japa-pop that deteriorated so quickly that by the not so late year of 1979 and the ridiculous Poppin' album there is already not one single interesting track or song, in fact, I couldn't even listen through completely to one song without fast forwarding, or worse in fact, I couldn't even listen to more than 10 seconds of each song without jumping to the next.  So it's similar to Paul Dirac's famous delta function that starts at zero, is able to jump to infinity at the unity point and then drop to zero again in all subsequent numerical inputs.  (This mathematical function found its place to everyone's surprise in quantum physics.)  To be honest we've seen this kind of thing before, one masterpiece standing shoulders-high in a large field of garbage or perhaps more appropriately a swirling oceanic pacific patch of plastic refuse.  But I'm being a bit too unkind to this artist.

I think the album Circus (1976) has some really fun compositions reminiscent of the best of Godiego, albeit quite a bit simpler, and worse, and Spacy (1977) of course in addition to the magnificent and masterful art, is good from beginning to end.  A true delight.  His discography is here.  The bio states the following:

Singer-songwriter and producer, born 4 February 1953. Husband of Mariya Takeuchi. Heavily influenced by American jazz, soul & big band music, his first album, Add Some Music To Your Day, containing cover versions of songs by the Beach Boys and other golden age American songs, is now extremely rare & sought-after. His major debut came in 1976 with Circus Town, which was recorded in New York and Los Angeles, the former with the participation of famed conductor & arranger Charlie Calello.

His popular breakthrough came in 1980 with the release of Ride On Time, whose title track peaked at #3 on the Oricon singles chart and was used in a TV ad for Maxell audio cassettes featuring Yamashita. He is probably best-known for composing & performing his 1983 song "Christmas Eve", which appeared on his album Melodies that year and was notably covered by Pentatonix for the Japanese release of their That's Christmas To Me album.

He is also famous as record collector and the DJ of Japan's most famous oldies radio show called "Tatsuro Yamashita's Sunday Songbook" (TOKYO FM). This program started on October 3, 1992 as a Saturday Songbook, but changed to the Sunday Songbook on April 3, 1994. And it is a long run program that continues to date.

Clearly he is popular as witnessed by the fact wikipedia English lists him (not the wonderful Japanese version with its AI-artful poetic translations), and when I listen to a great song like Minnie, I can see why-- here on youtube, not sure why not removed due to copyright.  (In which case, you can try the general search function with links here.)

From the 'masterpiece' Spacy (check out again the boy with the X-ray jet-killing vision) the seventh track, viz. (言えなかった言葉を):