Music Jar – week 6

Each week, I listen to a different artist, chosen at random from a pickle jar full of names.
This week was the turn of Japanese-American singer-songwriter Hikaru Utada.

It’ll come as little surprise that I wasn’t aware of Utada before this week. It was a pleasant surprise for me to enter a world of 90s pop music and journey forward from there. Utada was deemed “the most influential artist of the decade” in the Japanese music landscape and here I am listening to her for the first time.

There’s a romanticism to Hikaru Utada’s work, alongside the pop sensibilities and titles such as First Love, Find Love and One Last Kiss attest to this. It’s clear where her influences come from and what her intentions are. In this age where everything feels a lot more fraught, it was nice to bathe in Utada’s music, to feel that positivity and affection.

Thank you to my friend Mika for the recommendation.

My Spotify playlist of artists for 2022 will be built up here.