Hideaki Tokunaga, a Japanese singer and songwriter, maintained an active recording career that stretched across multiple decades from the mid-1980s deep into the twenty-first century. Although his highest commercial standing arrived during the early and middle stretches of the 1990s, he continued to register notable achievements afterward, above all through the three albums that form the Vocalist series, which appeared in the mid-2000s. Born on February 27, 1961, in Yanagawa, Japan, Tokunaga entered the album market in 1986 with Girl, and Radio followed before that same year ended. From then on he delivered a fresh full-length project on an essentially annual schedule. Even as his audience receded somewhat after the middle of the 1990s, prompting a run of retrospective compilations—Ballade of Ballade (1997), Single Collection (1986-1991) (1998), and Single Collection (1992-1997) (1998)—Tokunaga kept working and preserved a respectable level of popularity in subsequent years. Entering the new century, he issued a particularly noteworthy trilogy: Vocalist (2005), Vocalist 2 (2006), and Vocalist 3 (2007). In 2008 the Vocalist set was gathered into a box-set edition, while Singles Best and Singles B-Side Best were also issued that year.
