LET'S DO IT

ABOUT THIS ALBUM

Released in 1978, LET’S DO IT marked Minako Yoshida’s move to Alfa and placed her songwriting inside a genuinely international soul-production environment. The album was produced by Gene and Billy Page and recorded in California with major Los Angeles session musicians including David T. Walker, Ed Greene, Wah Wah Watson, and Greg Phillinganes. That lineup gives the record a different scale from Yoshida’s earlier Japanese sessions: rhythm is deeper, strings and horns are more expansive, and the grooves have the relaxed authority of late-seventies West Coast soul. Yet the album never loses Yoshida’s identity. Several songs are her own compositions, while Tatsuro Yamashita contributed music to “Flames of Love” and “Clouds,” and Ryuichi Sakamoto co-wrote “I Wanna Be Your Shadow.” Yoshida’s voice sits comfortably inside the American arrangements without being reshaped to imitate an American singer; her phrasing remains unmistakably personal. LET’S DO IT is therefore less a case of a Japanese artist borrowing foreign production than a genuine exchange between two studio cultures, with Yoshida’s harmonic and melodic instincts meeting Los Angeles soul musicians on equal terms.