Another terrific single off of that first J-pop mix I got, (and truthfully, when you consider that that tape was the thing that more or less INTRODUCED me to the world of J-pop, pretty much EVERY song on that cassette is gonna be a certified “fave”!) “Anata wo Kanjite Itai” was the very first song I ever heard from the beautiful stylings of Izumi Sakai and ZARD, a group (or artist, whichever) that would go on to become one of my favorites!
ZARD always seemed like a mystery to me- I never saw them performing on any of the TV shows I watched, and even their CD covers all had this very vague look to them, complete with washed out colors and that famous ZARD logo, but I remember wanting to know more about them! At the time, Zard’s sixth album FOREVER YOU had just come out, but a guy at work made copies of his ZARD albums Oh My Love and Yureru Omoi which became the first albums I heard, and they were in fact the first non-CoCo j-pop albums I listened to!
When I first heard Anata wo Kanjite Itai, I figured ZARD to be a kind of dreamy, poppy type of band, but listening to Oh My Love and Yureru Omoi, found they really touched upon all genres of music, from gentle love songs to Beatlesy tunes to almost hard-rock!
By the time TODAY IS ANOTHER DAY came out, ZARD was just about my favorite group, and I remember those days of frantically trying to trace down each and every album and single release! And boy, in the days before the internet, IT WAS HELLA HARD!!!! Ah, but boy, was it worth it!!!
