A drummer turned lyricist makes the map of a song specific.
City pop is easily reduced to an attractive blur: light outside the window, water somewhere beyond it, and a driver's seat into which almost anyone might slide. Takashi Matsumoto reminds us that songs also need addresses. Before becoming a professional lyricist, he played drums and wrote words in Happy End alongside Haruomi Hosono, Eiichi Ohtaki, and Shigeru Suzuki. Language, in that history, belongs inside the band. It is not a caption attached after the instruments have finished their business.
Mariya Takeuchi's “September” offers a compact example. Columbia's catalogue of Matsumoto's work identifies his lyrics and Tetsuji Hayashi's composition and arrangement, and dates the single to August 1979. The title supplies only a month, yet immediately gives romance a calendar. September can suggest an ending and the practical necessity of beginning again. The month belongs to a calendar, but also to the seasonal associations each listener brings along. A very small unit of time makes room for many unrelated memories.
The same catalogue connects Matsumoto with Ohtaki's “Kimi wa Tennenshoku” and “Canary Islands.” Colour, islands, months: these are also the raw materials of travel advertising. A song can do something less obedient with them, allowing the distance between an image and a life to remain unresolved. Nor should Matsumoto be reduced to the supplier of a single metropolitan writing style. His movement from a band to records by different singers makes authorship look more like the provision of inhabitable language than the installation of identical décor.
Follow producers through city pop and a map of studios begins to emerge. Follow a lyricist and another urban history appears, measured in how people name a season rather than how many towers occupy a skyline. Matsumoto's place in this atlas is a useful invitation to read that second map. The distance between writer and singer can be an artistic resource: neither a performance nor its reception requires a certificate of autobiography. Sometimes the more precisely an address is written, the more strangers can find their way inside.