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RockerZ Soft Rock VibeZ

Sixty-eight tracks of music that was critically despised for thirty years and is now quietly beloved. Soft rock has had the last laugh.

The rehabilitation of the seventies

Soft rock — the melodic, immaculately produced, largely Los Angeles-made pop of roughly 1972 to 1984 — was for a long time the most sneered-at music in the rock canon. It was too clean, too commercial, too obviously the work of session professionals rather than tortured artists.

The reassessment came from two directions. Musicians noticed the harmonic sophistication and the playing; hip-hop and modern-funk producers noticed the immaculate recordings and started sampling them. What was once called adult-oriented rock is now discussed as yacht rock, and the affection is genuine.

Sixty-eight tracks is a proper survey, and it takes in the disco-adjacent, the country-adjacent and the straightforwardly strange.

What to listen for

Boz Scaggs' "JoJo" is the sophisticate's pick. Scaggs' Silk Degrees was recorded with the musicians who went on to form Toto, and it is one of the best-made records of the decade.

Kenny Loggins' "This Is It" was co-written with Michael McDonald and is about Loggins' father facing surgery — considerably heavier than its smoothness suggests.

Christopher Cross appears twice, and "Sailing" is the genre's purest distillation: a song about nothing happening, arranged perfectly.

Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons' "December, 1963" is the biggest record here and one of the most successful singles ever released.

Stephen Bishop's "On And On" and Orleans' "Dance with Me" are the deep cuts collectors love, and Player's "Baby Come Back" is the archetype.

The Bee Gees' "Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)" is the one to play for anyone who only knows the disco era — the Gibb brothers were extraordinary songwriters long before Saturday Night Fever.

Soulive and Dave Matthews' "Joyful Girl" — an Ani DiFranco cover — and Stereophonics' "Maybe Tomorrow" are the modern intrusions, and both fit.

Go deeper

Three albums: Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees, Steely Dan's Aja, and Toto's Toto IV. Those three explain the entire aesthetic and the musicianship behind it.

For the session players who actually made this music: Jeff Porcaro on drums, David Hungate and Lee Sklar on bass, Larry Carlton and Steve Lukather on guitar. The same names recur across hundreds of records.

And for the afterlife: Japanese city pop — Tatsuro Yamashita, Mariya Takeuchi — is essentially this music made in Tokyo, and it has had its own extraordinary internet revival.

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