Yo! Welcome to a brand new series of posts on HPT I’ll be starting entitled ‘If You’re Listening to an Idolm@ster Song, Try This One‘ where I select a song from im@s and provide a sample for you to listen to along with a brief write-up about it. If we combine all of the im@s songs throughout each series including covers then im@s has contributed to well over 1000 songs by this point. Since it can be quite a feat to find and listen to all of them, I wanted to create this series in order to bring some attention to the lesser known songs of im@s. I would also like to talk about some of the famous or influential songs in im@s history too so please look forward to it. ✌
Today’s featured im@s song is Gift sung by Imai Asami, an old but personal favorite song of mine. It was one of the 12 songs on the THE IDOLM@STER RADIO LONG TIME album featuring songs from both Mingosu and Chiaking who both hosted for the radio show simply titled ‘THE IDOLM@STER RADIO’. Like many of the im@s radios that would come after, the two often sang cover songs on the show in between talk sessions and also had their own original song albums created while it was airing. Some of these songs are relatively unknown to Ps still since they don’t directly correspond to the idols in the im@s world itself. But to me im@s is im@s and radio programs have been very close to the promotion of im@s since the early days so I’ve always considered the radio songs to be important to the series as well (and a lot of them are great too).
Gift is a particular favorite of mine among both radio and im@s songs in general since while it is sung as Imai Asami, it still feels a lot like a Chihaya style song to me. The very first time I heard it was in a youtube video back in 2011 that made me think “wtf what Chihaya song is this!?”, followed by an immediate search of the song on google-sensei.
THE IDOLM@STER RADIO program itself aired from April 2006 to July 2009 with Imai Asami and Takahashi Chiaki as the hosts. LONG TIME was the last of 7 CDs released for the radio. The songs on the LONG TIME album were actually created with the image of months in mind starting with April as the first track.
1. Smile Smile Smile (April)
2. Lady☆Cake (May)
3. 7 colors (June)
4. Yell (July)
5. sunshine (August)
6. JM-Justify Myself- (September)
7. Akai Hana Saita (October)
8. Melting season (November)
9. Gift (December)
10. Tegami Uta (January)
11. pink no february (February)
12. Mata, Hajimayou. (March)
Gift being December’s song is pretty self-explanatory along with some of the others like sunshine, melting season, and pink no february. It’s pretty fun listening to the whole album and imagining how the song writers created the songs with the image of each month in mind. You can also check out some of the other tracks on its official page listing below ↓
http://columbia.jp/idolmaster/2009/COCX-35616.html
And that’s the first featured song in the Listening to im@s Song series. If you have any suggestions for other songs you’d like to see featured, feel free to let me know in comments below or on twitter. Until next time!
