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Dream Battle: America VS Bread

Eleven Bread, nine America. Two soft-rock bands from the same moment, matched almost track for track, and a genuinely close fight once you stop laughing at the premise.

The tale of the tape

The dream battle format needs two contenders who are actually comparable, and these two are almost uncomfortably so. Both arrived around 1970. Both built their sound on acoustic guitars, close harmony and unhurried tempos. Both sold enormously, were dismissed as soft, and have since been quietly reassessed by musicians who noticed how carefully the records are made.

Bread was David Gates, James Griffin, Robb Royer and drummer Mike Botts, later joined by Larry Knechtel — a Wrecking Crew veteran who played the piano on "Bridge Over Troubled Water." That is a serious band. Gates was a Tulsa-born arranger and session player, and Bread records are built with a precision their gentleness disguises.

America was Dewey Bunnell, Gerry Beckley and Dan Peek — three sons of US Air Force personnel who met at a school in London. That English upbringing is the whole reason their records sound the way they do: folk-rock structures underneath all the desert imagery. From 1974 they were produced by George Martin, who is credited here on two tracks.

Round by round

Bread lead with songcraft. "Make It with You" and "If" are the famous two, and "If" is a harmonically restless song hiding inside a wedding standard. "Everything I Own" is the one with the story — Gates wrote it about his father's death, and it later became a reggae number one for Ken Boothe and a hit again for Boy George, both times heard as a love song. "Aubrey," "Diary" and "It Don't Matter to Me" are the deep cuts, and "Guitar Man" is the reminder that they could play. "Lost Without Your Love" came from the 1976 reunion.

America answer with atmosphere. "A Horse with No Name" is two chords, a nonsense lyric and an unshakeable mood — it knocked Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" off number one, which Young found funny given how much it sounds like him. "Ventura Highway" is the better record and one of the great guitar figures of the decade. "Tin Man" is almost meaningless in the most pleasurable way. "I Need You" is Beckley's ballad and the closest they came to Bread's territory. "Lonely People" was written by Dan Peek and his wife as an answer to "Eleanor Rigby."

Then there is "Muskrat Love," which America recorded first and which has been mocked for fifty years. Play it anyway; it is stranger than its reputation. "You Can Do Magic" is the 1982 comeback, and "Sometimes Lovers" and "One Morning" are the album cuts most listeners will not know.

The verdict, and where to go next

Bread win on writing — Gates simply wrote more complete songs, and the band around him was tighter. America win on feel, and on having made two or three records nobody else could have made. Reasonable people land either way.

Albums: Bread's Baby I'm-a Want You and America's Homecoming. Worth knowing that Griffin and Royer wrote "For All We Know" for Lovers and Other Strangers under pseudonyms and won an Academy Award for it — and that the argument over whose songs became Bread's singles is largely what broke the band up.

This catalogue also sits directly next to the yacht rock revival, and both bands have been sampled more than you would expect — clean, uncluttered arrangements with real breaks are exactly what producers hunt for.

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