Hirai also wooed the club crowd with his remix CD KH Re-mixed Up 1 (2001), and continued to advance internationally in 2002-2003, appearing in Los Angeles with Babyface (he also wrote the song "Missin' You: It Will Break My Heart" for Hirai) releasing "Ooki Na Furudokei" (2002), the Japanese cover of "My Grandfather's Clock," which became a smash hit (772,000 copies sold) sharing the stage with Lauryn Hill at the FIFA World Cup concert and playing an MTV Unplugged in New York in 2003. The single "Kiss of Life" (2001) was used in the successful TV series Love Revolution, and the album Gaining Through Losing sold 1.5 million copies in all of Asia.
He returned in glory in 2000, when his third studio album, The Changing Same, sold 1.26 million copies (that year's "Rakuen" single added 500,000 more), getting him gigs at MTV Summer Summit in Taiwan and even the R&B mecca of the Apollo Theater in New York, with Hirai being the first Japanese performer to play the venue. He started big - his first two singles, "Precious Junk" and "Katahou Zutsu No Earphone" (both 1995), were used in TV dramas - but the sales of his two albums, Un-Balanced (1995) and Stare At (1996), were modest, and so Hirai proceeded with caution, dropping only two singles from 1997 to 1999. His career began in the early '90s: in 1993, Hirai, still a student, won an audition at Sony and got a deal with the label. Ken Hirai's steady, competent falsetto, good looks, and - most importantly - predilection for classic R&B and soul, which he mixes with jazz, funk, and hip-hop, made him a top-league feature on the Japanese scene and throughout East Asia, with the total amount of CDs he's sold being close to 14 million.
0 kommentar(er)
