When I was writing a list of the order I would review each “classic” Musume, I was quite amused to find that the topic of today’s entry, Abe Natsumi, is only a couple days younger than Kaori. This puts Abe at turning twenty-seven this year, and she doesn’t even look as if she’s aged a day in her lifetime.
Intriguingly, I knew her name before I even “met” the Morning Musume concept and was very surprised to find she had been a part of that. Of course, it was in reverse order (Natsumi Abe), and it still sounds so familiar to me in my mind. But Abe (I’ve never called her Natsumi or Nacchi, strangely), to put it broadly, was fantastic. She was the best singer out of her generation, and as such, she appropriately got many lines. Not enough to overshadow everyone else (Tsunku you need to quit while you’re ahead man), and even with the release of “Furusato” which was her song, I can’t muster the strenght to get pissed off about it. I just felt it was allowed, that she deserved it. Maybe because, in some way, all of the girls in that lineup shared the feeling of that song as one, only Abe was the voice of it. It’s become a Morning Musume classic and a standard for auditions nowadays, but I don’t think anyone will ever come close to matching Abe’s emotion in her original vocals.
