Shintaro Sakamoto Returns With 'Like A Fable'

Six years since his last album, Love If Possible, Japanese musical polymath and visual artist Shintaro Sakamoto has announced his fourth solo album, Like A Fable, for a June 3 release via Zelone Records/Secretly Distribution, sharing the title-track single and video. Pre-save Life A Fable here.

The album's ten songs describe everyday life in a world undergoing dramatic changes in the midst of the pandemic. The Tokyo-based composer/producer Sakamoto has continually updated his sound with each of solo LPs, exploring a wild array of instrumentation to meld disparate genres. With Like A Fable he has made his best pop album yet.

Like his previous albums, Like A Fable was recorded with the longtime members of the Shintaro Sakamoto Band: Yuta Suganuma on drums, AYA (OOIOO) on bass and backing vocals, and Tetsu Nishiuchi on saxophone and flute. KEN KEN (Ken2d Special, Urban Volcano Sounds) plays trombone on "That Was Illegal" and "You Still OK?". Soichiro Nakamura engineered and mastered the album. Artwork for the album was created by Sakamoto.

The title-track single is a depiction of everyday life during the past two years of the pandemic. This is Sakamoto Shintaro's Japanese POP song, evoking both the past before COVID and a future world after COVID. In the song, Shintaro reminisces about Kamishibai ['paper play'] - a form of Japanese street theater popular in the 1930s-1940s in which stories were presented on a series of illustrated boards placed on miniature stages. Video director, Yasuyuki Yamaguchi, visualized the world of Sakamoto's lyrics in this music video, featuring the dancer TANISHQ.

Shintaro Sakamoto led the Japanese psych-rock legends Yura Yura Teikoku for twenty years before embarking on his solo career in 2013, with How to Live with a Phantom, releasing three records on the Other Music Recording Co, while garnering praise from NPR Music, Pitchfork, Vice, SPIN, FLOOD, The Line Of Best Fit, Under the Radar, amongst others.

Listen to the new single here:

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