For this week's Three Tune Tuesday / Evening Groove, let's dive back into that March mixtape I made for my kids that I introduced last week. It will be morning Japan time when this posts, but I'm writing it in the evening and I've been relaxing to some music tonight. My internet hasn't been working well the past few days. That is an annoyance, but it also has the positive effect of making me want to do something else other than dicking around mindlessly on the net. Is chilling out to music better than mindlessly surfing the web? I'm going to say yes.

So anyway, let's jump in.

To refresh your memory and for those who can't be bothered to go back and read my previous post, here is playlist we are working with:

1. Yukiguni - Ikuzo Yoshi
2. Be-Bop - Milt Jackson & John Coltrane
3. A Little Less Conversation - Elvis
4. In the Air Tonight - Phil Collins
5. Gotta Knock a Little Harder - The Seatbelts
6. Mr Bojangles - Sammy Davis Jr
7. Brave Love, Tiga (Ultraman Tiga Ending Theme) - Earth Protection Force
8. Gera Gera Po (Yokai Watch Opening Theme) - King Cream Soda
9. Kimi o Nosete (from Castle in the Sky) - Azumi Inoue
10. Super Metroid "Heat Vision" - DarkeSword
11. Dance of Pales (Symphony of the Night) - Laurence Manning
12. Watashi no Basu - Yumi Muruta

I make these playlists every week or three for my kids to listen to as they play or when we go driving. My goal is in addition to giving them their favorite music, also introducing them to all kinds of other songs so that when they enter their teenage years and start exploring music themselves they might have a wider appreciation and not just limit themselves to whatever the popular genre or song may be.

Last week I covered Be-bop by Milt Jackson and John Coltrane, Mr Bojangles by Sammy Davis Jr, and Watashi no Basu - Yumi Muruta. This week let's take a look at In the Air Tonight, Gotta Knock a Little Harder, and Dance of Pales.

In the Air Tonight

If you were around in the 80s, this song needs no introduction. For the rest of you, this was the lead single on Phil Collin's 1981 debut solo album. It was incredibly popular and became his signature song. There is a persistent urban legend that Collins wrote it after watching someone drown, presumably from people who take the lyrics too literally, but he has always denied that, claiming that he wrote it to release anger over his divorce and that he doesn't know what it's about. Whatever the case may be, this was one of the most influential songs of the 80s and is still held quite high up. In 2021 Rolling Stone listed it as number 291 on the top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. Here is the 2016 remaster of the studio edit:

If you enjoyed that, here is an amazing live performance.

Gotta Knock a Little Harder

The Seatbelts were quite the band, covering a wide range of genres in their songs. This is a great blues song sung by Mai Yamane and written by Yoko Kanno and Tim Jensen. It was written for acclaimed anime series Cowboy Bebop which was as much as exploration of music as it was adventure. Every album they did contained many different styles, from bluegrass to heavy metal, from western pop to traditional Arabic, from disco to the TV show's namesake, Bebop style jazz. Yamane's raspy voice is absolutely perfect for this song and elevates to another level. She normally only sung in Japanese, but chose English for this song and she hits it out of the park.

Dance of the Pales

This was a great piece written by Michiru Yamane for the Playstation game Symphony of the Night. The game wasn't expected to do much. It was a 2d game at a time when 2d was not at all popular, produced on a system that was known for their 3d games. The Playstation actually wasn't even able to handle 2d animation and scrolling, leading to a bunch of hacks to get it to work. Perhaps because of the low expectation, they went all out and tried a bunch of new things. One of those was in the soundtrack. The music was composed with a number of genres, primarily various classical styles, but also techno, jazz, and even metal.

Dance of Pales also known as Waltz of Pearls, is a mistranslation of パール舞踏曲, "Pearl Dance". I keep the English mistranslation in my track list because that is still the official English name and also it's kind of iconic at this point. It's a lovely little song. The version I have on this playlist is a cover from Laurence Manning, a classical pianist who likes to cover video game music in her spare time.

If you enjoyed that and want to see a full orchestral performance of it including the composer herself on piano, go watch it here.

I think next week we'll move away from the playlist, since only enka and kids songs are left. Actually I love enka so maybe I'll talk about that one next week. We'll see! But it might be time for me to make a new playlist for my kids anyway. At any rate, for now, there you go: three great tunes.

Any thoughts? Let me know in the comments. And thanks to @ablaze for hosting this.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.