hitomi - By Myself (11 September 1996) torrent

Hitomi Furuya, better known simply as hitomi, is one of Japan’s most successful solo pop artists. At the age of sixteen she began work as a model in 1992, already uncommonly tall for her age. A year later she caught the attention of Tetsuya Komura of Avex Trax, who recruited and produced most chart-topping 90’s J-Pop artists that you could probably name. It was he who decided ‘hitomi’ (all in lowercase) would be Furuya’s stage name.

hitomi debuted in late 1994 with the single Let’s Play Winter. It was a commercial failure, along with We Are “Lonely Girl” which followed. But the singles are notable for the fact that hitomi wrote the lyrics for both, very uncommon in the J-Pop industry at the time, and even now to a great degree. She has continued to write the lyrics for almost all of her songs to date.

hitomi started to garner commercial success and critical praise with her third single, Candy Girl, and those which followed. This culminated in her 1995 debut album, Go to the Top. Which the album did not accomplish, heh. It was successful, but it was her sophmore album By Myself, which I’ve ripped today, that was her first album to debut at number one on the Oricon charts and to-date remains her most commercially successful album. She wrote the lyrics for every song, with the help of Takahiro Maeda on three of them (tracks one, four, and eight). In the album are the seeds of the more sexually provocative music that would paint her later albums like Love Life (2000). The music of By Myself has less variety than her later work, but a lot of than can be chalked up to the fact that Tetsuya Komuro kept tight control of the reigns around her music, and hitomi would not experiment much with a diversity of musical influences until she broke away from Komuro in the following years, ultimately leaving Avex Trax in 2011. Nonetheless, By Myself is one of the best 90’s J-Pop albums in my opinion, and belongs in the collection of any fan of the genre.

As always I hope you enjoy the music!

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