可愛女人

"可愛女人" is Jay Chou at his most disarmingly light, and it works because the production is doing something quietly sophisticated underneath the sweetness. Built on a clean, almost bossa-inflected guitar figure with a soft shuffle behind it, the track keeps the arrangement uncluttered — brushed drums, warm bass, a wash of keys — so that everything rests on the melodic contour and the vocal texture. Chou sings in a half-swallowed murmur, sliding between notes, occasionally dropping into near-speech, which makes the affection sound offhand rather than declared. Vincent Fang's lyric is a young man's inventory of a girl's charm — her stubbornness, her small cruelties, the way her mood governs the weather of his day — and the writing's charm is that it never resolves into possession. He's describing someone he doesn't understand and doesn't want to. Released as the lead single of his 2000 debut, this was many listeners' first encounter with him, and its accessibility was strategic: it smuggled a strange new vocal style in through a genuinely pretty melody. It remains the Jay Chou song people who don't listen to Jay Chou can still hum. Good for a bright morning, a bus window, the early stage of liking someone before you've admitted it to yourself.