Heya, hope you're staying toasty this raining Thursday morning, today's Bento Box artist is: Anri!
Anri (杏里, Anri), real name Eiko Kawashima (川嶋栄子, Kawashima Eiko), is a Japanese singer and singer-songwriter born on August 31, 1961 in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan influential in propelling the city pop genre into the Japanese pop mainstream in the 80s. She has written much of her own music as well as singing songs written by others such as her debut release in 1978, Oribia o Kikinagara, by Amii Ozaki. Her song "Cat's Eye" was used as the first opening theme for the eponymous 1983 anime series Cat's Eye and debuted as #1 on Countdown Japan. It was one of the first J-pop songs used as an anime theme song, and it was included in a recent Dance Dance Revolution game. Her popularly skyrocketed following her appearance at the Red and White New Year's Music Special at the end of that same year.
Other hit songs include Summer Candles and Dolphin Ring, both of which became standard songs played at Japanese wedding and receptions. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Anri's albums were bestsellers. She is often cited as being one the first Japanese singers to fuse Britain and American music into j-pop. She has highly successful tours—one with attendance of almost 100,000—and toured Hawaii for the first time in 1987. She was given a boost by singing the closing theme for the 1998 Winter Olympics at Nagano. In 2002, she began collaborating with jazz fusion guitarist Lee Ritenour who produced her 2002 LP "Smooth Jam - Quiet Storm".
With the renewed popularity of city pop, and her songs having been sampled by many new artists of the vaporwave and future funk genres, Anri has enjoyed new success and popularity outside of Japan. Following her rediscovery, several of her albums were reissued in 2023. Anri currently lives in Los Angeles.