Junko Ohashi’s return to solo billing joins one name to many people’s work.
TEA FOR TEARS gives sadness a domestic utensil: no monument, no enormous farewell, simply a cup of tea. The title suits an approach to Junko Ohashi's 1981 album that lets feeling and ordinary life sit at the same table. Universal identifies it as her first return to solo billing after Minoya Central Station dissolved, produced by Kazuharu Honjo. Solo billing is an organization of names on a record. It need not be heard as somebody closing the door and leaving every collaborative relationship outside, to work in splendid isolation.
The relationships are, in fact, substantial. Yoshiko Miura supplies the album's lyrics, while “Telephone Number” pairs Ken Sato's composition with Mitsuo Hagita's arrangement. The responsibilities assemble around Ohashi's singing, making the idea of a solo performance properly complicated. One voice can occupy the centre while depending on several kinds of judgment to establish its surroundings. An album does not have to cancel cooperation in order to give its singer an independent position. The foreground has been reorganized; music continues to be made between people, with particular tasks and different kinds of authority.
“Telephone Number” is a natural entrance to the record now, but the published sequence offers another kind of patience. It occupies the fifth position among ten songs; the title track comes last. A familiar entrance is not the entire building. Continuing through the album means permitting less familiar titles to take up time, rather than treating them as corridors in which one waits for the recognizable song. The promised cup of tea can also suggest a pace of attention. Feeling need not be measured exclusively by its easiest moment to remember.
The album's value within a city-pop map belongs to both foreground and background. It records a change in the organization of a singer's career while keeping writing, composition, arrangement, and production in view. Reducing it to an attractive atmosphere misses those practical distinctions. “Solo” beneath Ohashi's name need not mean solitary, and the tears in the title need not demand gigantic drama. Sometimes pop only needs to let complicated matters sit down, give them a cup, and leave enough time for one voice to sing them through.