MR.VOCALIST 3

On 8 September 2010 Eric Martin marked twenty-five years of solo work with the best-of Love Is Alive – Works of 1985–2010, and two months later, on 3 November 2010, Sony Music Japan International released MR.VOCALIST 3 as SICP-2885, priced at 2,730 yen including tax. After songs by Western women artists on MR.VOCALIST 2 and a Christmas album, the series went back to the idea of the first MR.VOCALIST: hits by Japanese women singers, sung in English. The songs were chosen from requests that fans had sent to his homepage around the turn of the year, and the label presented the album as the closing part of a trilogy of covers of women artists' songs. The twelve tracks include Hikaru Utada's "First Love", AI's "Story" and Miho Fukuhara's "CHANGE", songs by Ayaka and Miyuki Nakajima, and a song best known in the voice of Rimi Natsukawa. The third track, a hit for Miho Nakayama with the band WANDS, is a duet with Debbie Gibson, whose own album of Japanese covers, MS. VOCALIST, came out on the same day. The fourth is a song by a duo of brothers that the enka singer Fuyumi Sakamoto had turned into a major hit with her cover; Martin's English version, with the violinist Emiri Miyamoto, was the first time the song had been covered in another language. The bonus track that closes the album is "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio. The day after the release, Martin and Gibson each sang songs from their covers albums at an evening event in Tokyo. Martin sang "First Love" and two more songs from the album, and for the last of them Sakamoto came on as a surprise guest; in the final chorus he sang in Japanese and she in English. The music video of the song with Miyamoto went online on 24 November 2010. Four of the songs were chosen for MR.VOCALIST Best on 6 April 2011, whose limited edition also included, for the first time, a version of the Nakayama song that Martin sang alone.