The language of “YOUR EYES” is a collaboration, not just a decorative accent.
At “YOUR EYES” on Tatsuro Yamashita's FOR YOU, the lyric column introduces Alan O'Day. That name can change the way English in Japanese pop is understood. English is not always a decorative flourish added to give a sleeve an international atmosphere. It can mean that a particular person has done the actual work of writing a song's words. Yamashita is credited with composition and arrangement, O'Day with lyrics. Crossing a language boundary becomes a collaboration whose participants can be named, rather than a vague prevailing wind of the period.
O'Day's short autobiography places his work with Yamashita beside an American songwriting career that included Helen Reddy's “Angie Baby” and his own “Undercover Angel.” Those few points give the writer of “YOUR EYES” a fuller outline. He is not a language service materializing inside a Japanese record. He arrives with songs, performing experience, and professional judgment of his own. Exchange becomes interesting because neither participant is blank, and because the resulting work cannot be reduced to one side borrowing an international accessory from the other.
Writing words for a melody involves more than meaning. A sentence has to be singable; stresses have to coexist with musical time; an impression of intimacy has to become possible within a limited span. These requirements make singing in English a different proposition from translating a sentence into English. O'Day's credit asks us to notice language as musical material: it conveys information, but it also occupies breath and duration. Even when a listener cannot follow every word, the sound of the writing participates in the song that listener receives.
“YOUR EYES” consequently need not be narrated as a one-way story of cultural import. It offers a small site of shared work, where Yamashita's composition and O'Day's language need each other, and audiences arrive from different linguistic starting points. “Globalization” is a convenient name for such connections, but a word large enough to flatten the people inside it. Keeping O'Day's name restores a human scale. The greater a song's ability to cross a distance, the more worthwhile it becomes to remember that distance did not write it. Somebody wrote sentences another person could sing.