I took July off for a month-long vacation from blogging. You need to take breaks, right? I was planning to come back last week to full-time blogging but I came down with a cold that made me feel tired and weak. It wasn’t coronavirus as I had no fever; just the sniffles. congestion, and fatigue.
This week’s #SongLyricsSunday doesn’t have a prompt per se, but a theme: find a tune with a harmonica playing in it. And what better song than the 1997 Jpop hit “Hate tell a lie” by Tomomi Kahala.
(This is part of a #SongLyricsSunday challenge, which is hosted by Jim at. Anyone can join! Details on how to participate are found at the end of this post!)
The Secret Behind Tomomi Kahala’s “Hate tell a lie”
“Hate tell a lie” is Tomomi Kahala’s sixth single. Released on April 4, 1997, it quickly charted #1 on the Oricon charts and sold over a million copies.
The title song was composed, written, and arranged by. If you don’t know who is Komuro, you missed out on the whole entire 90s pop scene of Japan. I have featured a handful of songs composed by Komuro, one of the biggest music producers of the 90s, in this blog: Misato Watanabe, Namie Amuro, globe, and TM Network. Although he has such a questionable reputation recently (fraud and ex-martial affairs), Komuro is still one of my idols as he wrote many of my favorite songs.
“Hate tell a lie” is actually one of the few songs that Komuro wrote the lyrics. He usually never wrote lyrics and left it someone else. But for the composition of the song, Komuro and Kahala were heavily influenced by Canadian singer-songwriter when creating “Hate tell a lie”. Kahala even plays the harmonica, which an element influenced by Morissette, by herself during the bridge.
Let’s Hear It
This 1997 single was one of my first singles by Kahala that I ever got. I got this single along with about 100 other singles and albums in a big box from Japan in 2007 (this was when I was living with my parents in the US). I really never heard of Kahala before getting my hands on a copy of “Hate tell a lie”.
After I listened to most of Kahala’s discography by the end of college, I really didn’t care much of “Hate tell a lie”. It is a great song, but I prefer more of her more popish songs like “Keep Yourself Alive” and “tumblin’ dice”. I hate to admit it but I find “Hate tell a lie” boring sometimes.
