I realized yesterday that Hosono House is in my top ten favorite albums of all time. And now I've updated the bottommost segment of my Personal Canon to reflect that, so there! It's official.
You can look up the album's backstory elsewhere. It's fairly well-documented.
But now that I think about it, its earliest origins might not be.
Apparently there was a period, back when Happy End was still together, when someone in management decided to pull a CSNY-in-1970 and have each member release a solo album, thereby (he hoped) raising the profile of the mothership.
That's the context for Eiichi Ohtaki's solo album, which came out between Kazemachi Roman and Happy End's second self-titled.
Shigeru Suzuki also got straight to work writing new material, which explains how he went from a single song on Kazemachi Roman to four Suzuki/Matsumoto co-writes next time around.
Hosono, likewise, got thinking. Sharing an Umbrella, which appears on the third Happy End record, had to leave an early version of the Hosono House tracklist to do so, which means that he'd already been writing with his solo album in mind.
Takashi, for his part, had to wonder: "Okay, and how do I, a drummer/lyricist, make a solo album?" The answer: find a new frontman to deliver a fully Takashi-written record. Enter Yoshitaka Minami... but that's a story for another time.
Anyway, Happy End broke up, so the "four solo albums" scheme became (from a record company perspective) meaningless. Hosono also seemed to concede, "Hmm, alright. So much for that." He was more interested in playing bass than recording a solo album. The Caramel Mama / Tin Pan Alley dream was taking shape inside him.
But his friends began to pester: "Hey Hosono, Ohtaki has a solo album out. Where's yours?"
I've seen comments on Japanese sites suggesting that, lyrically, Love is the Color of Peach Flowers is Hosono doing Matsumoto, but I think the only reason people say that is the presence of unusual colors in the song title. Like much of Hosono House, the lyrics are confessional, whereas Takashi's songs sound like fictional vignettes even when they're autobiographical.
In 1972, Hosono moved into a neighborhood that had formerly been living quarters for American soldiers, in the town of Sayama, some forty kilometers away from Tokyo (this is the part that's well-documented in English). The walls of the house really did stink with mildew. And, in tribute to the Band, Hosono painted the outside pink — like peach blossoms.
The "chariot made of fire" is not Elijah's chariot. It's the kasha of Japanese folklore, a monster in the shape of a fiery chariot whose job it is to carry the corpses of evildoers down to hell. So, yeah, not Elijah's chariot. In modern times, the phrase was repurposed to mean dire financial straits. (That said, Hosono was having visions of the end of the world around that time...)
I love how the verse about "coughing out my merry songs" communicates both how little Hosono thought of his own voice, and how highly he thought of the music.
And how beautiful is the "rain was falling" bit?
:::
So where am I now? What is this place?
Oh, it doesn't matter. Anywhere's alright.
As for the road I took to get here —
well, I can forget all about that now, right?
The soil is fragrant
and I smell paint.
The walls have turned as white as ivory
and the sky the color of glass.
I spend night after night
coughing out my merry songs,
racing into darkness
in a chariot made of fire,
playing games of tag
with the red moon.
I've come down this road before,
this river road.
And I have glimpsed this town
between breaks in the clouds —
little wonder that it seems so familiar.
If rain was falling in your heart
and I closed my umbrella,
I wonder whether I'd get wet too.
The rain is fragrant
and the mildew stinks.
The sky has turned gray
and love the color of peach flowers.
I've come down this road before,
this river road.
And I have glimpsed this town
between breaks in the clouds —
little wonder that it seems so familiar.
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