Haruomi Hosono’s endless experiment
With a new tribute album celebrating the legacy of his solo debut, Hosono House, the Japanese legend’s radical creative energy continues to ripple across borders and generations.
Particularly striking, however, is one of the two songs re-recorded in English. Sam Gendel’s spare acoustic cover of “Koi wa Momoiro,” is totally enthralling. Translated fully into English and renamed “My Love Is Peach-Colored,” it is, Hosono wrote in a brief email to The FADER, the first song he heard from the project. He described it as “surprising” and “refreshing,” and, up next to the original, it is an immensely creative reinterpretation, its melancholy derived as much from its subtle discordance as from Gendel’s whisper-quiet voice. For those who, like me, don’t speak a word of Japanese, Gendel’s translation reveals the song’s gentle, cloud-covered existentialism for the first time: “This is the road I set foot on before / A road by the river …