Tatsuro Yamashita
photo: kamasami kong · cc by-sa 2.0 ↗Tatsuro Yamashita is a Japanese singer-songwriter and producer widely credited as the architect of city pop, building lush, harmonically dense arrangements out of his lifelong fandom for American doo-wop and West Coast pop. After cutting his teeth in the pioneering group Sugar Babe, he went solo in 1976 and became one of Japan's most enduring hitmakers, from the 1980 smash "Ride on Time" to the perennial holiday standard "Christmas Eve."
Yamashita has long been known as one of Japan's most devoted Beach Boys evangelists, tracing his own fascination with dense harmony and studio polish back to hearing them as a teenager.
listen forPlay the Beach Boys' lushly layered 'Good Vibrations' next to Yamashita's 'Sparkle' — both stack vocal and instrumental parts into a dense, ever-shifting wall of sound built for headphones as much as radio.
Yamashita's gateway into American pop was surf-rock instrumental groups like the Ventures, whose clean, driving electric-guitar sound left a lasting mark on his own guitar-forward arranging.
listen forCompare the Ventures' twangy, propulsive 'Walk, Don't Run' with Yamashita's 'Christmas Eve' — strip away the vocal and synth textures and the same tightly picked, forward-driving guitar pulse is still doing most of the work.
Yamashita has cited doo-wop and vocal-harmony groups like the Four Freshmen as a deep influence on his ear for chord voicings, and their close, jazz-tinged harmonic sense feeds directly into the dense backing vocals he stacks on his own records.
listen forListen to the tight, jazz-chord harmonies on the Four Freshmen's 'Day By Day,' then hear Yamashita layer similarly close, chromatic backing vocals under himself on 'Morning Glory.'