Beginning with its title, the new Paramount+ documentary, Sometimes When We Touch: The Reign, Ruin, and Resurrection of Soft Rock is built around a timeline where an entire genre became reviled, then revived. The “Ruin” episode tags soft rock’s decline to the arrival of MTV as well as a torrent of pop-culture derision (although much of what it cites is actually the real-time trashing of MOR/pop like “Feelings” or “You Light Up My Life” that took place in the ’70s/early ’80s, even as soft rock ruled).
It is certainly true that many of the hitmakers of the late ’70s/early ’80s stopped having real hits around 1983, but have found a new audience over the last decade, thanks to sampling, movie syncs, “Yacht Rock,” and, in Air Supply’s case, AC radio’s Christmas format. But other acts, such as Kenny Loggins, Daryl Hall & John Oates, or Glenn Frey, followed the music and kept having hits on MTV and the livelier, resurgent Top 40 format, which had almost ended up in drydock during its own 1980-82 doldrums.
Even during the years of CHR’s greatest excitement, there were occasional hit ballads (Jack Wagner’s “All I Need,” Peabo Bryson’s “If Ever You’re in My Arms Again”) that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1980-81. Christopher Cross went cold, but Chicago came back, then spawned solo Peter Cetera. By 1986, Steve Winwood was back. By 1987, even Dan Hill had another hit. Yacht-rock act Pages changed its name and tried ’80s synth-pop, until Mr. Mister finally had hits by averaging the two.
Sometimes When We Touch is well-done and enjoyable; I’ve since seen other music documentaries that make me appreciate it even more. But “Soft Rock” never went anywhere, even as the artists who ruled it in 1979-83 were replaced. There are a lot of component parts to Adult Contemporary radio, but there has always been music with some combination of rock lineage and singer/songwriter ambition (or, for detractors, pretension). Every era has its soft-rock acts, including the present.
It’s always hard to know where to draw the boundaries of “soft rock.” Elton John, James Taylor, Harry Chapin, Bread, Albert Hammond, and Bill Withers would be categorized differently over time, but shared fans at the time. When “mellow rock” stations like KNX-FM Los Angeles showed up, the line that separated artists with and without rock credibility became even blurrier.
Similarly, the soft pop that dominated fall ’77 came from a spectrum of differently credentialed artists: Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, and Electric Light Orchestra; the Bee Gees; Firefall and Little River Band; Dave Mason, Linda Ronstadt, Rita Coolidge, Carly Simon, and Taylor; Paul Davis, Stephen Bishop, and Dan Hill; Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle, and Ronnie Milsap. If you group those acts differently, that’s the point. After 10 weeks at No. 1, “You Light Up My Life” had selected itself into a place of special and permanent derision, but most of the hits were painfully earnest, waiting to be enlivened by Saturday Night Fever.
For its creators, Yacht Rock is as clearly defined as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, centered on the intersection of rock and pop with R&B, fusion jazz, and disco. Yacht Rock retroactively gives Quincy Jones and George Benson — among the few R&B acts that Top 40 acknowledged in that era — their place in the firmament. It pointedly does not include those things like “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” or “Margaritaville” that are nautical or tropical in name only. It’s “Soft Rock” that is the nebulous term, and although the documentary’s conceit works best with “Yacht Rock” acts, the broader definition lets the filmmakers include Air Supply, Hill, and Rupert Holmes. That’s probably fine for most fans.
In a documentary co-produced by MTV, the network itself is positioned as a generational dividing line. The early MTV wasn’t quite that defined — on the first day, it was playing Lee Ritenour — but eventually it would create a new crop of soft-rock artists, and many of them were acts that began with new-wave credentials (Joe Jackson, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, Tears for Fears, Thompson Twins, Paul Young, Berlin, even Wham! — who began with the support of KROQ Los Angeles).
Over the last 40 years, “soft rock” has come from a variety of places. Here are just a few in rough chronological order from the mid-’80s through today. It’s not a comprehensive history of music played by AC as much as music with a seeming connection to some aspect of the ’70s/early-’80s music spotlighted here, whether yacht or not.
- Rock acts that trafficked heavily in power ballads — mostly corporate rockers like Bryan Adams, REO Speedwagon, Heart, Starship, Journey, and John Waite — but also the evolution of Phil Collins/Genesis and even U2’s two most enduring Joshua Tree hits.
- The “quality rock”/“adult rock” acts that began to have hits as Album Rock radio reacted to Classic Rock: Dream Academy, Danny Wilson, Crowded House. (In Canada, even Sade is part of this grouping, with support from rock radio.)
- The beginnings of the female singer-songwriter revival: Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, 10,000 Maniacs, Sinead O’Connor, Melissa Etheridge. Rosanne Cash and Mary Chapin Carpenter belong in their company, but find their hits in Country instead.
- Early-’90s acts like Wilson Philips and Michael Bolton. In the documentary, “Adult Contemporary” is positioned as something that destroyed soft rock, but if you accept Air Supply in that universe, the early-’90s acts look more like successors.
- Holdovers from the ’80s (or before) who had hits amidst CHR’s early-’90s confusion, sometimes with help from MTV Unplugged, including Eric Clapton, Adams, Rod Stewart, and Bonnie Raitt. Nothing is more of a soft-rock thru-line than John Mellencamp making a brief comeback with a Van Morrison song.
- L.A. Reid and Babyface, who took that MTV Unplugged sound to Boyz II Men and TLC (and even work with Clapton). Reid is one of the next-generation voices in the documentary, but his own role in the music’s evolution is never spelled out.
- The acoustic pop acts that hadn’t yet become defined as “Modern AC” but were waiting for listeners as they returned from Country radio, particularly Sheryl Crow, Jewel, the Cranberries, and Hootie & the Blowfish. In the tradition of Soft Rock 15 years earlier, these acts had gotten their earliest support from Alternative radio, especially pop-leaning stations such as WNNX (99X) Atlanta and WAVF Charleston, S.C. In part, this is because any act that could credibly start at Alternative wanted to go there, not CHR first, even after CHR started to break teen pop single-handedly.
- The rock acts (Matchbox 20, Goo Goo Dolls, Train) and one-shots (Vertical Horizon, Verve Pipe) and Lilith Fair singer/songwriter acts (Sarah McLachlan, Shawn Colvin, Paula Cole) that did become the center of Modern AC — the successor to KNX-FM — once the Jewel-to-Tool coalition at Alternative radio ruptured.
- A generation of younger acts — Avril Lavigne, Vanessa Carlton, Colbie Callait, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Christina Perri, even Alicia Keys — who brought singer/songwriter music to the teen-pop generation.
- Acts like the Fray, Plain White T’s, and One Republic who came from emo/teen punk or nearby.
- The line of female jazz/retro R&B acts that began with Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae and continued through Adele, with Amy Winehouse becoming a category unto herself in between.
- The early 2010s tent-revival folk from Mumford & Sons, Lumineers, and even Philip Phillips, as well as acts on the cusp of Adult Top 40 and Triple-A — Milky Chance, Echosmith, Passenger (the successors to ’90s one-shots like Primitive Radio Gods and Dog’s Eye View that also came from stations like 99X and WAVF).
- Male singer/songwriters from Europe and the UK, such as Dean Lewis, James Bay, Lukas Graham, and Lewis Capaldi. Ed Sheeran is an exemplar here, but with a pure-pop side that, like Kenny Loggins, follows the music to other places as well.
You could argue that the current successor to early-’70s (or late-’70s) soft rock is the music shared by Triple-A and Alternative, including the continued careers of the Lumineers and Milky Chance. But for younger listeners, it’s really the music first characterized as bedroom pop and only sometimes propelled to the mainstream by TikTok and streaming. Early on, I saw a connection between Joni Mitchell and Billie Eilish, even if moms who grew up with the former couldn’t understand what their daughters saw in the latter.
Like ’70s soft rock, this generation’s chill pop comes from a lot of places, and encompasses a lot of acts with varying degrees of apparent gravitas that have everything and nothing to do with each other — Steve Lacy, Stephen Sanchez, SZA, Rosa Linn, Tai Verdes, Powfu, Omar Apollo, Girl in Red, and the Walters are just some of those that have made it as far as Top 40. Two years later, I am inclined to put Olivia Rodrigo in a different category, but “Driver’s License” is still on two Triple-A stations. As with ’70s soft rock, listeners will sort the piles in ways we don’t now, in part because many listeners aren’t bothering to sort the piles to begin with.
For my review of Sometimes When We Touch, click here.
