Flowers, signals and mornings bring the luminous city back to human scale.
A city open only after dark makes an excellent postcard and a difficult place to live. The title City Lights by the Moonlight readily supplies a luminous skyline. Its tracklist preserves smaller objects as well: a traffic signal, hydrangeas, an alarm clock, a morning shared by two people. They pull attention from the distant outline toward inhabited space. Reading the sequence as a city with a full day is an editorial possibility, not evidence of an intended concept album. It simply keeps one handsome title from occupying the whole record.
Tomoko Soryo’s second solo album originally appeared on October 25, 1977. Its title song comes first, followed by Shingoki, the traffic signal. On the page, a broad urban image immediately meets a small piece of public equipment. Light is something to admire, but also something that allocates time and tells people when to wait. This reading lets romance coexist with the ordinary rules of movement. It does not retell the song’s lyrics or pretend that a track title is a complete account of what the recording does.
Near the middle come Ajisai no Hana, Mezamashi Dokei and Futari no Asa: hydrangeas, an alarm clock, a morning for two. The scale draws inward. A flower can occupy a vase, a clock a bedside table, a morning an apartment. Familiar city-pop imagery sometimes enlarges leisure until waking up and keeping house fall out of the frame. These names make room for what that picture leaves behind. An album need not become a sociological survey to suggest that the inhabitants of beautiful cities must eventually get out of bed.
Small-scale subjects do not necessarily imply small-scale production. STEPS’ account of Soryo’s early albums identifies a greater use of electric instruments, horns and strings on the second; Sony’s reissue description foregrounds Yasunori Soryo’s arrangements. Those descriptions offer production context, not a substitute for listening to individual tracks. They nevertheless permit an interesting juxtaposition. Elaborate musical resources can gather around the vocabulary of ordinary life. Refinement need not point only toward a distant resort. It can also provide a setting for something as close and repetitive as another morning.
Later titles place Whisky Lullaby beside I SAY WHO before arriving at Hohoemi wo Misete. A drink, a lullaby, a question and a requested smile occupy a compact neighborhood. We do not have to stitch them into a plot to appreciate the possibilities of their adjacency. Albums leave intervals between situations; listeners bring their own experience across those intervals. That freedom can be more generous than supplying every song with a predetermined cinematic scene. A sequence can hold several kinds of life without turning them into a single story.
The ten-track Blu-spec CD2 issued in 2023 makes this arrangement available again, placing 1977 beside another generation of listeners. A reissue cannot manufacture a unanimous historical mood. It can encourage us to stay with more of the titles, including the unglamorous alarm clock. Within a city-pop atlas, the record’s value need not be a guarantee that the city always glitters. It can also allow interiors, interruptions and waking hours into the picture. The skyline is beautiful; someone still has to continue living there the following morning.