高嶺の花子さん

"高嶺の花子さん" turns unrequited longing into something almost comic, which is why it endures. Musically it's the sunniest thing in the back number catalogue: bright major-key guitar pop, a bouncing bassline, four-on-the-floor drive, handclaps and a chorus engineered to be shouted at a summer festival. The production is clean and radio-forward, with none of the shadow their ballads carry. Shimizu's reedy voice — usually a vehicle for devastation — sounds giddy and breathless here, tumbling over the syllables in the verses like a man saying too much too fast. The title puns on *takane no hana*, the unreachable flower, by turning it into a woman's name: Hanako-san, the girl too far above him, who he stares at while rehearsing conversations that will never happen. The lyric is deliriously specific — imagining her boyfriend, imagining being her boyfriend, deciding he'd be fine just being noticed. That gap between the euphoric music and the hopelessness of the situation is the joke and the ache at once. In Japan it became a wedding and karaoke standard despite being, strictly speaking, a song about failure. Play it in a crowd with people who will sing the chorus back at you, windows open, summer coming.