Sugar Babe's SONGS is more than a waiting room for future careers.
SONGS is a title almost unwilling to decorate itself. It announces no revolution and promises no particular city. There are songs here, and there is more than one. Sugar Babe released the album on April 25, 1975, as the first album on Eiichi Ohtaki's Niagara label. Later listeners naturally arrive knowing Tatsuro Yamashita or Taeko Onuki and wanting to find a beginning. That entrance is understandable, but it can turn a band into a waiting room, as though the important work will start only after its occupants have left.
Onuki's official site preserves unusually precise credits. Ohtaki and Yamashita co-produced the album, with all arrangements by Yamashita; “Shinkirō no Machi” is Onuki's work, while Kunio Muramatsu wrote and sang “Tameiki Bakari.” A few lines make the plural more than grammar. Different people occupy recognizable positions inside the work. The band's name does not cover over their differences; it gives those differences a way to coexist. A shared arranging responsibility and several writing identities can be true at the same time, without cancelling one another.
“DOWN TOWN,” “Itsumo Dōri,” and “Ame wa Tenohira ni Ippai” place a public location, an ordinary condition, and the small scale of a body next to one another. In this vocabulary, a city does not require a monumental landmark to become present; a palm can be somewhere to observe weather. The changes of scale give the ordinary noun songs a kind of patience. A song need not always represent a grand position. It can make a sufficiently exact container for a day, a habit, or a modest portion of feeling.
The more consequential SONGS becomes historically, the more worthwhile it is to release it briefly from the duty of founding something. A beginning does not acquire all its value from what follows. People made a bounded record together, which already merits attention. We can move onward to work by Yamashita, Onuki, Ohtaki, or Muramatsu, or remain here with the plural as a right to share space. The modest title leaves room for the songs in front of us. The waiting room becomes a room again, occupied by people who are doing something besides preparing to leave.