Thursday, September 10, 2026

Today, an old friend from my middle school days, Ottori MK, stopped by the bar for the first time in quite a while.

All kinds of people come through my place.

There are regulars, of course, and sometimes friends from my school days.

And every now and then, someone I haven’t seen for years suddenly appears at the door.

Lately I’ve begun to think that one of the nicest things about having this place is seeing people from long ago come back again.

MK and I have known each other since middle school.

It has been a very long friendship.

You could probably call it one of those friendships that simply refuses to disappear.

We both loved music from an early age.

On weekends, we would buy records and then show them off to each other.

“Look what I bought.”

That sort of thing.

We also used to go around to rock bars together.

We were still very young, and I suppose we were trying to act a little older than we were.

If a record came on that we didn’t know, we listened carefully.

If something caught our attention, we wrote down the album title or the name of the song.

Then we used those notes the next time we went looking for records.

This was long before you could pull out a phone and find almost anything in a few seconds.

That was how we chased music back then.

The radio-cassette player I was given around that time is still with me.

These days it sits on the counter at Bird.

When I think about that, it all feels a little strange.

Years ago, MK and I were the ones wandering around rock bars together.

Now I’m the one running a music bar called Bird Song Cafe.

And today, one of the friends I used to chase records with came to visit my own place after all these years.

What brought MK here this time was something I had posted on Instagram: “Ume-chan’s Rock Memoir.”

Not long ago, I had featured a Solomon Burke record.

MK saw the post and thought,

“I’d like to hear that record.”

So he came to Bird.

Well, if that’s the reason you came, then of course we have to play it.

Except there was one problem.

We couldn’t find the Solomon Burke record.

I knew it was in the bar somewhere, but no matter where we looked, it didn’t seem to appear.

That happens with records.

When there are enough of them on the shelves, the one record you know is there can somehow become impossible to find.

In the end, it was MK who found it on the shelf.

We finally had Solomon Burke in our hands.

We put the needle down.

And the two of us listened.

Come to think of it, perhaps what we do hasn’t changed very much after all.

Years ago, we went from record shop to record shop, then to rock bars, always looking for records we didn’t know.

Decades later, the two of us are still searching through record shelves.

The difference is that now, those shelves are in my own bar.

And when we find the record, we listen together again.

I already knew about Solomon Burke when I was in middle school.

When you look at him, with that huge physical presence, you might imagine a singer who simply throws everything outward and shouts at full force.

But that isn’t really how I hear him.

Rather than pushing everything outward, he seems to draw the emotion inward.

He is extremely good at holding something back.

That restraint is part of what makes him such a great singer.

If I had to make a comparison with a Japanese singer, Hiroshi Itsuki might give you some idea of what I mean.

Soul music has given us many famous singers, Marvin Gaye among them.

Even so, I have always thought of Solomon Burke as one of the great leading figures of soul music.

There is another Solomon Burke album I would especially like people to hear.

It came out in the first half of the 1970s and is deeply connected with the atmosphere surrounding the American civil rights movement of the previous decade.

It was a period when many people were demanding rights that should have been theirs simply as human beings.

Against that background, you can hear Burke’s own thoughts and sense of purpose in the record.

Each song carries a strong message, and between the songs there are spoken passages by Solomon Burke himself.

So it doesn’t feel like just another collection of songs.

If you listen to the album from beginning to end, you begin to feel something of the period itself — and perhaps something of what Solomon Burke was thinking at the time.

It is a very interesting LP.

If that sounds like something you might enjoy, I hope you will look for it and listen.

I’ve spent most of my life looking for records, listening to them, and talking about music with friends.

And now I get to enjoy that same music with people who come into my own bar.

When we were in middle school, MK and I went around to rock bars together.

When we heard a record we didn’t know, we wrote down the title so we could look for it later.

A great deal of time has passed since then.

Now I’m the one putting records on the shelves and lowering the needle.

Then an old friend, someone who once searched for records beside me, read “Ume-chan’s Rock Memoir” and came to my bar because he wanted to hear one.

And today, the two of us searched for a record again.

We found it.

We put the needle down.

And once again, we listened together.

When I think of it that way, I realize that music has been beside me for a very long time.

It was good to see MK again and to talk about everything from the old days to the music we still listen to now.

I’m simply grateful to have had a day like this.

That’s all for tonight.

Good night.

Ume-chan’s Rock Memoir 🍑
Special Edition｜Director’s Cut

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