Magically, two of the few circulating tapes of Happy End shows happen to have Drifting Clouds on them. They're both rough AUDs, but the band had one of them cleaned up for their comprehensive eight-disc Happy End Box release from 2004. That one's not on YouTube, but here is the other, unofficial one.
Maybe it was that resurgence on the Box that got Shigeru thinking about the song again. He took his time, in any case — another sixteen years... but earlier this decade, Shigeru's old band Skye (formed originally in 1968, two years before Happy End, with Tatsuo Hayashi drumming, Masataka Matsutoya on keys, and Ray Ohara on bass ... notice any line-up similarities with Caramel Mama?) reformed and put out a debut album (they've done more since). Shigeru, who hasn't stayed busy as a songwriter, nevertheless contributed a Suzuki/Matsumoto song called, aha, Drifting Clouds. The lyrics were the same. The melody in the chorus was the same too. But Shigeru slowed the tempo way, way, way down, and completely redid the verses.
The Skye version is one of the most brilliant examples of the songwriting art that I can think of.
I love poetry. And I love instrumental music. But when you set a text to a melody, something just happens. Or, rather, can happen, if everything goes well. And of course there are many degrees of "well."
When Shigeru was young, and read these words of the young Takashi's, he made a fiery rock song out of them. But Shigeru the old man recognized the timeless aspects of what young Takashi had written all those decades ago. He recognized them — understood them perfectly — and set about making a tune and arrangement that would cast them into relief.
The Happy End version is fun. The performance is amazing, of course. But Skye's version is so beautiful that I can't really listen to it without crying. (The first three lines is all it ever takes.) Old Man Shigeru's phrasing on this song is absolutely right on — patient, tender, broken-down — the riff is gorgeous, and Shigeru's voice is fragile this time rather than confident, awed by the moment he's describing.
Awe is the right response.
I think Takashi's lyrics are about something I've lived through just enough times (three? four?) for it to matter: the kind of moment that, in my experience at least, lies at the core of a long-term relationship — the very engine of love, as it were (how's that for a soft rock song title? I love how Matsutoya's keyboard tone in the Skye version keeps the SSSRT torch burning).
I don't really know how to write about it. I guess what I should say is just: read Takashi's words below, and you'll know. But since I like going on and on and on about things...
In the years before I got married, I fell in love really, really hard about three or four times. And man, did those feelings not want to die. A couple of those relationships had ended early — another two had never made it into the relationship stage at all — and I remember thinking, as my future wife and I started dating, "What do I do with all these leftover feelings? And how do I know whether my love for this girl will ever equal what I felt for those others? Is it even fair to her, for me to be with her?"
I've always been the brooding type, so I brooded and brooded, even as the relationship gained its feet. But there came a day when we were staying at her parents' house — we were cuddling in bed in the early evening, nothing racy, the door open to the family and all — when all of a sudden, something somewhere in me, or maybe in the world itself, shifted, and all I could feel for the woman I later married was an absolute, total, all-consuming, overwhelming, unadulterated, blindingly obvious and clear love. I couldn't stop staring at her. Her voice seemed to be sewn out of sheer light. The feeling lasted for an hour or two. And the whole time I kept thinking, with as much conviction as I've felt about anything in this life: "I love this woman as much as I have ever loved anybody. Maybe more."
The feeling had descended on me, unexpected, unannounced — it lingered a while — and eventually it dissipated, and things started feeling normal again instead of transcendent. But I've never forgotten it.
It's happened another two or three times in the eight years since. Every time, it feels like a miracle. It feels like exactly what life is about — one of the few true reasons that life is worth living, despite all the suffering and sorrow. And the love that has come over me at those moments is so strong that its traces get me through the worst of doubts and arguments at the relationship's low points, which of course have been many, and frightening. But those moments of all-consuming love and peace are undeniable. If I ever doubt whether the marriage is worth the pain it brings with it, those moments come back to mind.
Like I said, Takashi didn't take Shigeru to task for not recording the song. Maybe he realized Shigeru hadn't gotten it right. But Takashi hung on to these sentiments, these images. The instrumental closer of Apryl Fool bandmate Hiro Yanagida's Sons of Sun record is called Drowsing Doll. The see-through earlobes reappeared on Happy End's third album, in Eiichi Ohtaki's Country Road (props to myself-of-a-few-months-ago for specifying that image as the best in the song). And the song's set-up — two lovers falling quietly, peacefully asleep together, the boy staying awake a little bit longer — got reused, far less effectively, on Chu Kosaka's Hosono-penned Shooting Star City.
So the fact that Shigeru ended up recording and releasing a version of Drifting Clouds that did justice to Takashi's words (a version that, at present, you'll find in my top three Takashi Matsumoto songs, alongside Suburban Train and The Marriage Talks — which are both from 1972 as well... god, what a year) is one of those unlikely felicities that only has a chance of occurring when an artist lives a long, long time. By the time he was making the Skye version, Shigeru knew what it meant to live, and to live with pain, and loss, and uncertainty, and everything else that the young couple in Takashi will eventually have to face. Shigeru wrote and sang with it all in mind.
So praise God that there is such a thing as living into your seventies, with your faculties more or less intact, as the J.D. Salinger line goes. May we all be so lucky.
:::
In the shade of the blue and purple trees
you look as peaceful
as a drowsing doll.
Your earlobes are see-through in the sunlight,
bright red and ripe
like wild strawberries.
In the shade of the blue and purple trees
you look as peaceful
as a drowsing doll.
The wet grass is swaying
amid the sound of children's lively footsteps
in the light.
The wind is so gentle, so gentle.
Pretending not to notice you're there,
it plucks a soft kiss
from your lips.
The drifting clouds
float softly away.
I hear the faint sounds of the city.
Daylight drifts down through swaying trees.
Pretending not to notice you're there,
it applies a little light make-up
it applies a little light make-up
on your cheeks.
In the shade of the blue and purple trees,
I begin to be
more and more like
a drowsing doll myself.
:::
Postscript, for myself as much as anyone else: this piece, in Japanese, about the Skye version, is fantastic.
(Back to: List of Translations)
(Back to: List of Translations)
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