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Wednesday, December 04, 2002
#20 Maria Joćo & Aki Takase, "Send in the Clowns"
Now the singer, well, the singer's first language is most obviously not English. From the sound of it, she's doing it all phonetically. Nearly every word shows signs of a struggle. She blithely misses all those verbal cues native Englishers don't notice until they go wrong in a spectular fashion. Words are often accented in completely the wrong way, as if she's got no experience about what usually means what. She pronounces words apologetically, even go as far as wrecking the rhythm of a line to make sure all those hard consonants are nice and sharp: "...one, who keeps stearing arount..." and "WITH. My UuuZZzzuaaal flaairrr."
I've been listening to this for weeks and I've assumed that Takase -- the one with the Japanese-sounding name -- was the singer. Ha ha ha, the joke's on me. She turns out to be the accompanying pianist. Maria Joćo is the singer...and she's from Portugal, not Japan. Still sounds Japanese to me. She has a very girlish voice, and nearly every Japanese woman vocalist I've ever heard is girlish-sounding to some degree. (But I listen to a LOT of j-pop so what could I know?)
And yet, in the midst of all of that, after a particularly clumsy "I thoughT, that you'd wanT, what I wanT. Sorry..." she returns with one moment, a great moment, the only moment she sings rather than exercises her voice, a "my dear" so high and so soft, and so sharp and professional, it's so lovely I wish the whole song was her just doing that and that alone.
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