The Tragedy of Seals & Crofts
by Will Robertson
When most people think of the 1970s folk-pop duo Seals and Crofts, they remember one song in particular, the saccharine soft pop confection “Summer Breeze.” Released as the lead single from their 1972 album of the same name, an unceremonious premier by an obscure Boston radio station helped it to eventually claim the #7 spot on the Billboard music charts and become a staple of oldies and easy listening radio stations ever since. It has developed into their signature song, partially because of them not having any major hits after a self-inflicted career nosedive in the mid 1970s (more on that later), but mostly because of the fact that it would be nigh impossible to find a band more aggressively uncool or in possession of less “street cred” than the duo of Darrell “Dash” Crofts and James “Jimmy” Seals. In Dash and Jimmy, we are talking about two proficient folk musicians from small towns in oil-dependent central Texas, who upon moving to Los Angeles, joined the Bahai faith, inked a multi-album deal with the most prostitutionary of the major labels, Warner Brothers, and almost immediately began emitting some of the most insipid balladry ever released in pop music.
What is most tragic about the history of Seals and Crofts isn’t their aversion to musical risk, curtailed chart success, or uninteresting creative legacy; it is that they were treated by the industry in solely an industrial capacity, yet still never felt any compulsion to rebel against it. They were signed by Warner to act as appliances in the creative process and increase the label’s income by way of scripted melody, not to be “artists” who might reduce profit by trusting their own creative vision. The lowest-common denominator was always their target audience; it is music for 59-year-old men in decaying post-industrial towns across America, folks who go to the same bar for a dinner of “hot brown and cold yellow” five nights a week, ex-quarterbacks who insist on appallingly singing Queen every “Karaoke Tuesday” despite their own intense homophobia, and cammo-wearing “patriots” who won’t accept the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 United States Presidential election.
The music-listening public is just not aware of the complicated history of the business entity commonly known as Seals and Crofts. When people hear “Summer Breeze,” they don’t think of how the song exemplifies the unhealthiest tendencies of 1970s pop music and how the band is a textbook example of “creative decline,” they only hear pleasant guitar work, tight harmonies, and an irresponsibly catchy vocal melody – pleasantries that serve to mask the difficulties of their own lives. It isn’t beneficial to blame them for enjoying the pleasurable aspects of pop music, but in order to fully understand the history of the band and their surficial art, we must dive deeper into the reasons for their artistic failure and eventual demise.
Seals and Crofts ingratiated themselves onto the LA soft rock scene in the late 1960s. Initially they were only a folk duo in possession of exemplary playing abilities, unsophisticated production techniques, and rather conservative political views, but after being stalked by an agent from Warner Brothers, things changed. He saw them as an intensely profitable commodity. The confidently illiterate Darrell “Dash” Crofts, with his rudimentary vocals, grotesque facial hair, and consistent mandolin playing, was to be the “frontman” of the duo, while the timid James “Jimmy” Seals, despite having a far less irritable voice, was the brains behind the operation due to his skill at songwriting and playing the acoustic guitar.
Warner envisioned that their rural naiveté, coupled with their generally reliable musical skillset and unique mandolin-focused instrumentation, would result in a long career full of critical acclaim, sold out stadium-shows, and platinum album sales. Seals and Crofts were to be the Southern response to Simon and Garfunkel, and since they had a near total absence of original thought, they were far less likely to make public statements that would interfere with the label’s profitability or brand.
This partnership worked well during the first few years of Seals and Crofts’ career. Tracks like the precious “When I Meet Them,” the sultry ballad “Summer Breeze,” and the uptempo family appreciation anthem “Diamond Girl” did quite well on the Billboard charts, sold in large quantities, and wormed their way into the conscience of the American public. The two band members, meanwhile, were able to play on syndicated television shows and wax poetic about their early lives in Texas with veteran showrunners like Johnny Carson, buy fine homes in the Hollywood Hills, and enjoy substantial attendance at their concerts. Once the novelty of their sound and individual backgrounds wore off, however, things to a turn for the worse.
To compensate for their waning freshness, Seals and Crofts decided that their best option was to make a calculated turn toward the adult contemporary market. According to the LA session men of the era, the trio of Jimmy Seals, Dash Crofts, and their steadfast producer Louis Shelton, had a reputation of merciless perfectionism so unyielding that it rivaled the notoriously malevolent tendencies of Steely Dan. Musicians would regularly be required to complete over 100 takes on a single song, which meant that once these tracks were mastered and put on an album, the band’s sound was indescribably soulless. Interesting sonic properties were expertly varnished for radio airplay and commercial potential, meaning that when listeners returned for repeated listens, they grew bored very quickly.
The music was not created for the sustained pleasure and admiration of a specific fanbase, it was made to take advantage of the worst tendencies of American mass-market consumerism and turn these tendencies into fine yachts for music executives. When listening to the extremely slight drivel demonstrated throughout their final album, 1980’s The Longest Road, one wonders why they were even able to achieve success in music in the first place. The lyrics are mundane, the vocal performances utterly incongruous, there is minimal genuine creativity seen throughout the discography of the band, and their entire musical brand is based on a nonsensical rejection of both creativity and critical thought.
The music of Seals and Crofts offers almost nothing to the modern listener, yet there is something about their sound that still has the potential to cause intrigue. Their synthetic version of American folk music nearly perfectly encapsules a “major label sound,” the vocal harmonies are proficiently crafted, and the lyrics are relatable to mass quantities of people. Unfortunately, these are also the factors that led to the band’s downfall.
The two principal reasons for the failure of Seals and Crofts are as follows; given their early material and image, it would have been impossible for them to develop a more sophisticated sound or brand other than through disgracefully artificial means, and due to their lack of nuance in inserting their own sociopolitical analyses into the music, they repelled a large portion of their audience only four years after releasing their debut album (1969’s Seals & Crofts). It isn’t as if the lyricism of Seals and Crofts was ever on the level of Keats, but by the mid 70s, their lyrics were pared down to comprise only two subjects; generic commentary on love lost or gained, or distasteful political commentary based on their perspectives as members of the Baháʼí Faith, a religion founded in the 19th century to “teach the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people.” Given the band’s lack of precaution when incorporating this ideology into their conventional pop songcraft, the response of the album-buying public was to castigate them at shows and ignore all of the albums they released afterward. This resulted in their sound only growing more commercial as they vainly attempted to find new fans with each album (even going so far as to record a soulful RnB duet with former Honey Cone member Carolyn Willis for the title track of 1976’s Get Closer). As one might presume, this desperate attempt to be relevant once again did nothing to reverse their musical decline, and only caused them to lose more integrity.
The first concern with Seals and Crofts involves the self-limiting mechanics of the music they created and the problems associated with their rather unfortunate visual aesthetic. The mandolin, which was part of their initial originality and a major reason for them signing to Warner in the first place, did not provide a sound that could easily fit on pop radio in the late 1970s, and as such, what was once a distinctive aspect of their sound became their Achilles heel. As African American influences significantly impacted pop music through the popularity of funk and disco, Seals and Crofts were stuck in the past, writing lifeless ballads on topics no one in their right mind wanted to hear the band’s perspective on. Their one attempt at a disco crossover, 1978’s “You’re The Love,” was only a minor chart hit, and signified to the music-listening public that if Seals and Crofts were recording disco tracks too, the genre could no longer be considered hip.
Another musical limitation the band faced was their lack of vocal ability, especially in the case of primary vocalist Dash Crofts. Early in their career, from the late 1960s to about 1973, the simple folk instrumentation and snug vocal harmonies on their albums obscured this inadequacy, but after they shifted to an adult contemporary sound (around the time of 1975’s album, I’ll Play For You), they released tracks like “One More Time” (off 1978’s Takin’ It Easy) and “If and Any Love” (from 1980’s The Longest Road), which made the technical limitations of Croft’s nasal sneer even more obvious than they had been before.
On the former, we find the singer forcing a vibrato so incessantly that it makes his voice come across far thinner than it otherwise might. The fact that this track is a ballad only makes the problem worse, since the slow tempo and luxurious instrumentation give more room in the mix to his overdramatic vocal runs, during which we can also hear Croft’s lack of proper breath control. On the latter song, “If and Any Love,” the verse and chorus shapes only validate the notion that Crofts truly has no soul or depth to his reedy tenor. It isn’t that Crofts has an irredeemably terrible voice, it’s just that the sound of it is distinctly unsuited to the high-budget perfection of the instrumentation. Boz Skaggs had a similar issue (music journalists often opined that he sang like he had “a frog in his throat,”), but he was able to overcome this difficulty on the 1976 album Silk Degrees by leaning into his unique vocal character, not forcibly contorting his voice to hit notes on songs originally written for radically different artists.
The next limitation regarding the mechanics of the band’s instrumentation and branding has to do with their despondent visual aesthetic. This aesthetic can be seen in the press photos taken of the band throughout their career and their gaudy choice of album artwork. In almost all press photos, we see the two band members standing next to each other staring intently at the camera. Their facial hair is usually frenzied, the clothing appears dated, and the background is always entirely unremarkable. One piece of regalia that connects nearly all these photos is the newsboy cap consistently worn by Jim Seals, which when viewed now, only emphasizes how unadventurous and dated their music now sounds. He is in his thirties in these photos, yet appears eligible for a senior discount at the nearest truck stop diner.
In terms of Seals and Crofts’ album covers, the vast majority of them are extremely unflattering. In the beginning of their career, for example on their eponymous debut album, the covers were simply bland photos of the members standing next to each other leering at the camera, but as they gained popularity, this concept metamorphosed to create what might be the least visually pleasing discography of all time. The cover of 1975’s I’ll Play for You shows the duo playing their respective instruments surrounded by a suspiciously-fartlike blue cloud, backed by a close-up shot of their faces superimposed uncomfortably on the top part of the background. It is a ghastly image. The custom font choice for the band’s logo also does them no favors, since it makes the album seem as if it was released two decades prior. For 1976’s Get Closer, the font choice resembles the oft-mocked Comic Sans, while the windblown hair of the band members and primary color palate of their attire signifies a shallow attempt at humor. All of their other album covers only accentuate their lack of visual appeal, occasionally to a horrific degree.
The second cause for Seals and Crofts’ demise is tied to their ideology and the way they not-so-subtley shared these political views with the general public, a sector that was in no way interested in hearing their perspective. This is most clearly seen in the band’s decision, despite Warner’s desperate protests, to title their sixth album Unborn Child. Released in early 1974, the album featured their most sophisticated instrumentation to date, but also marks the point at which the band entirely gave up on obscuring their political views. One listen to the album’s title track reveals that this composition is a far cry from the basic folk schlock of their debut. The song opens with Jimmy Seals singing atop a bell solo designed to sound like a child’s mobile, then at the 17 second mark, a soaring Eagles-esque guitar solo enters the mix atop a platform of blaring horns. Overdramatic guitar flourishes sparkle periodically throughout the rest of the track, and during the outro a 36-piece orchestra is invited to join in on the fun.
The track may sound civilized if you are to ignore the lyrics, but if there is a more ineffectively ostentatious way to share one’s political beliefs with people you’ve never before spoken to, I’m unaware of it. It seems entirely overdone, like nobody summoned up the courage to tell Dash or Jimmy that they weren’t going to change minds simply because they had a more expensive sounding album. The top studio musicians in LA at the time; David Paich on keyboards, David Hungate on bass, and Jeff Porcaro on drums (all of whom would later go on to start Toto), played across the entire album, giving it a sheen only possible when your major label shells out the big bucks to hire the best musicians in the world for the sole purpose of salvaging the abominable music you’ve spent their money in creating. All they accomplished was cheapening the lyrical sentiment.
It is possible that this sheen is what caused their subsequent irreversible career decline. By combining a somewhat controversial viewpoint with the sumptuous instrumentation only a major label like Warner Brothers could afford, they were neither authentic in their proselytizing nor socially accepted. The sinister chorus on Unborn Child’s title track, “Mama stop! Turn around, go back, think it over, Now stop, turn around, go back, think it over, Stop, turn around, go back think it over” was both a semi-misogynistic command and an allegory to their own stylistic direction, since it could be argued that the band ended the “life” of their music by selling out to the smooth reverberations of LA studio musicians. They had courted the sentiments of right-wing evangelism before (see the lyrics of their 1971 track, “Year of Sunday”), but by commenting on the issue of abortion so directly, they were marked by many in the recording industry as religious wack-jobs who had exhausted the entirety of their commercial appeal. When every subsequent Seals and Crofts album failed to yield a hit comparable to 1973’s “Summer Breeze,” these judgments proved true.
The late 70s were a time of social angst for Jimmy Seals, Dash Crofts, their producer Louis Shelton, and the few fans they had left. Sociopolitical issues such as the Iran hostage crisis, the proliferation of disco onto adult contemporary radio stations, and the secularization of society as a whole left the band members distraught, and in response they felt the need to craft a musical retort. What resulted were Seals and Croft’s two weakest albums, 1978’s Takin’ It Easy and 1980’s The Longest Road, the bands final release and whose lack of chart success resulted in them getting dropped entirely from Warner Brothers and breaking up.
On the first of these albums, Takin’ It Easy, Seals and Crofts felt the need to “[go] way down south to Louisiana, close [their] eyes [since] everything's all right,” and “make [their] getaway” (a lyrical excerpt from the track “One More Time”). For publicity reasons, the band members decided to shift their personas from being the descendants of oilmen in the hills of Texas to a more confederate signifier. The album’s conceptual setting is pre-abolition Louisiana, with the album artwork having been photographed at the historic Oak Alley Plantation and all lyricism describing either the plight of 1970s Southern living or generic topics about lovin’ (as exemplified by the song “Nobody Gets Over Lovin’ You”). The lyrical themes of the album were incorporated into the music in a far more dignified manner than the tactless Unborn Child, but it was still a repulsive attempt at integrating their undeniably backwards social values into the context of an overproduced pop album.
1980’s The Longest Road marked a final attempt by the band to capitalize on what little airplay or positive critical reception they continued to have at the end of the 70s. The album’s instrumentation was even more professional (read: synthetic) than the last one, and the lyrical themes somehow less interesting, but due to some unanticipated circumstance, Crofts’ vocals sounded better than they had in almost a decade (I suspect that this was a result of widespread multitracking in the studio and the album having song structures with less vocal exposure, not a result of him actually improving his technique). It is unfortunate, then, that the lowest point of the band’s career occurs at the beginning of side B. The song “Egypt, Israel & America” represents everything wrong with our current era’s culture of conservative megachurch Protestantism, starting with its own punctuation. The inclusion of the comma between “Egypt” and “Israel” and ampersand between “Israel” and “America” imply that the relationships between these countries isn’t equal. Despite spending most of their career waxing poetic about how all of us on the planet earth are from “one family” and that we must “love one another as all people,” Seals and Crofts are still unable to detach themselves from a worldview intent on segregating the Middle East into allies and enemies. They are only able to give us songs that reek of the Sykes-Picot Agreement signed by the British and French half a century earlier.
After three more extremely slight tracks, “The Longest Road,” “I Keep Changing The Faces,” and “Silver Rails,” we reach the final song released by the band in their original incarnation, “One Planet, One People, Please.” A monument to all the verbal excess, posturing, and confident ignorance of the pro-life hippie subculture of the late 70s, it stands today as the most intriguing failure of their career (most of them aren’t intriguing in the slightest). The tune starts with a predictably self-indulgent guitar and mandolin duet, before Seals’ vocals enter with the lyric “Strong is the light of unity.” Crofts then replies with the next line to suggest that this unity can “light the world for you and for me,” then the two band members harmonize by asking “So why don’t we reach out and be one planet, one people, please?” Aside from having questionable grammar, this first verse does nothing but emphasize how ineffective the band was in actually bringing about the social changes they wished to see.
Throughout their run, Seals and Crofts were stuck in an impossible place; too folk-reliant and callously devout to gain a dedicated public audience and convince listeners of their views, yet too ensnared by the intense profit-focus of the recording industry to have any kind of authenticity in their proselytizing. The question we must ask then, is, how much of Seals and Crofts’ music can we rightfully enjoy without feeling as if we are endorsing a regressive and oversimplifying view on the state of the world?
Their discography is, more than anything else, a monument to the devastation that occurs when the profit motives of corporate America intersect with the personal convictions of fraught artists trying to ensure their own economic survival. There is, however, still some kind of appeal that exists beneath their manufactured instrumentation and conservative lyrics. One almost admires the band for the courage they demonstrated by even attempting to bring their rather backwards-focused worldview into the context of major label pop– they certainly had guts. Even on the most basic songs included on their early albums, which have chord progressions so basic they sound like kindergarten singalongs (see “When I Meet Them,” off 1971’s Year of Sunday), the melodies are incessantly catchy, the vocal harmonies constructed with care, and the instrumentation recorded with an almost profane level of clarity. The track “Year of Sunday,” despite being filled with cringeworthy lines about how “God made a pact with Abraham, Abraham gathered his family, and brought his people home,” even includes a short mandolin solo (at 0:51) that could be seen as a precursor to the post-punk-revival scene that developed in the early 2000s in New York City. These brief moments of greatness are precisely why I continue to return to some songs in the Seals and Crofts discography, as they hint at a melodic and harmonic potential only partially realized by the band.
The chord progressions of Seals and Crofts often strike the ultimate balance between melancholia and elation, the basslines are usually interesting, and the inclusion of the mandolin tends to add a nocturnal quality to the songs, yet when the tempos ease, these positive attributes are reduced to merely being addendums to some of the most irritably bland music ever created in the history of American recorded music. Further problems occur when Crofts or Seals decide to tackle a specific issue and turn their lyric sheet into a misinformed treatise on the problems they see within the contemporary world. The band’s final track, “One Planet, One People, Please,” concludes with each member pleading “Please let it be” before they unite in harmony for an overly-drawn-out “Ah.” They implore all of humanity to preserve the positive aspects of their individual cultures as they move forward into an increasingly commodified and culturally integrated world. If only the band had taken this idea to heart.
What is most tragic about the history of Seals and Crofts isn’t their aversion to musical risk, curtailed chart success, or uninteresting creative legacy; it is that they were treated by the industry in solely an industrial capacity, yet still never felt any compulsion to rebel against it. They were signed by Warner to act as appliances in the creative process and increase the label’s income by way of scripted melody, not to be “artists” who might reduce profit by trusting their own creative vision. The lowest-common denominator was always their target audience; it is music for 59-year-old men in decaying post-industrial towns across America, folks who go to the same bar for a dinner of “hot brown and cold yellow” five nights a week, ex-quarterbacks who insist on appallingly singing Queen every “Karaoke Tuesday” despite their own intense homophobia, and cammo-wearing “patriots” who won’t accept the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 United States Presidential election.
The music-listening public is just not aware of the complicated history of the business entity commonly known as Seals and Crofts. When people hear “Summer Breeze,” they don’t think of how the song exemplifies the unhealthiest tendencies of 1970s pop music and how the band is a textbook example of “creative decline,” they only hear pleasant guitar work, tight harmonies, and an irresponsibly catchy vocal melody – pleasantries that serve to mask the difficulties of their own lives. It isn’t beneficial to blame them for enjoying the pleasurable aspects of pop music, but in order to fully understand the history of the band and their surficial art, we must dive deeper into the reasons for their artistic failure and eventual demise.
Seals and Crofts ingratiated themselves onto the LA soft rock scene in the late 1960s. Initially they were only a folk duo in possession of exemplary playing abilities, unsophisticated production techniques, and rather conservative political views, but after being stalked by an agent from Warner Brothers, things changed. He saw them as an intensely profitable commodity. The confidently illiterate Darrell “Dash” Crofts, with his rudimentary vocals, grotesque facial hair, and consistent mandolin playing, was to be the “frontman” of the duo, while the timid James “Jimmy” Seals, despite having a far less irritable voice, was the brains behind the operation due to his skill at songwriting and playing the acoustic guitar.
Warner envisioned that their rural naiveté, coupled with their generally reliable musical skillset and unique mandolin-focused instrumentation, would result in a long career full of critical acclaim, sold out stadium-shows, and platinum album sales. Seals and Crofts were to be the Southern response to Simon and Garfunkel, and since they had a near total absence of original thought, they were far less likely to make public statements that would interfere with the label’s profitability or brand.
This partnership worked well during the first few years of Seals and Crofts’ career. Tracks like the precious “When I Meet Them,” the sultry ballad “Summer Breeze,” and the uptempo family appreciation anthem “Diamond Girl” did quite well on the Billboard charts, sold in large quantities, and wormed their way into the conscience of the American public. The two band members, meanwhile, were able to play on syndicated television shows and wax poetic about their early lives in Texas with veteran showrunners like Johnny Carson, buy fine homes in the Hollywood Hills, and enjoy substantial attendance at their concerts. Once the novelty of their sound and individual backgrounds wore off, however, things to a turn for the worse.
To compensate for their waning freshness, Seals and Crofts decided that their best option was to make a calculated turn toward the adult contemporary market. According to the LA session men of the era, the trio of Jimmy Seals, Dash Crofts, and their steadfast producer Louis Shelton, had a reputation of merciless perfectionism so unyielding that it rivaled the notoriously malevolent tendencies of Steely Dan. Musicians would regularly be required to complete over 100 takes on a single song, which meant that once these tracks were mastered and put on an album, the band’s sound was indescribably soulless. Interesting sonic properties were expertly varnished for radio airplay and commercial potential, meaning that when listeners returned for repeated listens, they grew bored very quickly.
The music was not created for the sustained pleasure and admiration of a specific fanbase, it was made to take advantage of the worst tendencies of American mass-market consumerism and turn these tendencies into fine yachts for music executives. When listening to the extremely slight drivel demonstrated throughout their final album, 1980’s The Longest Road, one wonders why they were even able to achieve success in music in the first place. The lyrics are mundane, the vocal performances utterly incongruous, there is minimal genuine creativity seen throughout the discography of the band, and their entire musical brand is based on a nonsensical rejection of both creativity and critical thought.
The music of Seals and Crofts offers almost nothing to the modern listener, yet there is something about their sound that still has the potential to cause intrigue. Their synthetic version of American folk music nearly perfectly encapsules a “major label sound,” the vocal harmonies are proficiently crafted, and the lyrics are relatable to mass quantities of people. Unfortunately, these are also the factors that led to the band’s downfall.
The two principal reasons for the failure of Seals and Crofts are as follows; given their early material and image, it would have been impossible for them to develop a more sophisticated sound or brand other than through disgracefully artificial means, and due to their lack of nuance in inserting their own sociopolitical analyses into the music, they repelled a large portion of their audience only four years after releasing their debut album (1969’s Seals & Crofts). It isn’t as if the lyricism of Seals and Crofts was ever on the level of Keats, but by the mid 70s, their lyrics were pared down to comprise only two subjects; generic commentary on love lost or gained, or distasteful political commentary based on their perspectives as members of the Baháʼí Faith, a religion founded in the 19th century to “teach the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people.” Given the band’s lack of precaution when incorporating this ideology into their conventional pop songcraft, the response of the album-buying public was to castigate them at shows and ignore all of the albums they released afterward. This resulted in their sound only growing more commercial as they vainly attempted to find new fans with each album (even going so far as to record a soulful RnB duet with former Honey Cone member Carolyn Willis for the title track of 1976’s Get Closer). As one might presume, this desperate attempt to be relevant once again did nothing to reverse their musical decline, and only caused them to lose more integrity.
The first concern with Seals and Crofts involves the self-limiting mechanics of the music they created and the problems associated with their rather unfortunate visual aesthetic. The mandolin, which was part of their initial originality and a major reason for them signing to Warner in the first place, did not provide a sound that could easily fit on pop radio in the late 1970s, and as such, what was once a distinctive aspect of their sound became their Achilles heel. As African American influences significantly impacted pop music through the popularity of funk and disco, Seals and Crofts were stuck in the past, writing lifeless ballads on topics no one in their right mind wanted to hear the band’s perspective on. Their one attempt at a disco crossover, 1978’s “You’re The Love,” was only a minor chart hit, and signified to the music-listening public that if Seals and Crofts were recording disco tracks too, the genre could no longer be considered hip.
Another musical limitation the band faced was their lack of vocal ability, especially in the case of primary vocalist Dash Crofts. Early in their career, from the late 1960s to about 1973, the simple folk instrumentation and snug vocal harmonies on their albums obscured this inadequacy, but after they shifted to an adult contemporary sound (around the time of 1975’s album, I’ll Play For You), they released tracks like “One More Time” (off 1978’s Takin’ It Easy) and “If and Any Love” (from 1980’s The Longest Road), which made the technical limitations of Croft’s nasal sneer even more obvious than they had been before.
On the former, we find the singer forcing a vibrato so incessantly that it makes his voice come across far thinner than it otherwise might. The fact that this track is a ballad only makes the problem worse, since the slow tempo and luxurious instrumentation give more room in the mix to his overdramatic vocal runs, during which we can also hear Croft’s lack of proper breath control. On the latter song, “If and Any Love,” the verse and chorus shapes only validate the notion that Crofts truly has no soul or depth to his reedy tenor. It isn’t that Crofts has an irredeemably terrible voice, it’s just that the sound of it is distinctly unsuited to the high-budget perfection of the instrumentation. Boz Skaggs had a similar issue (music journalists often opined that he sang like he had “a frog in his throat,”), but he was able to overcome this difficulty on the 1976 album Silk Degrees by leaning into his unique vocal character, not forcibly contorting his voice to hit notes on songs originally written for radically different artists.
The next limitation regarding the mechanics of the band’s instrumentation and branding has to do with their despondent visual aesthetic. This aesthetic can be seen in the press photos taken of the band throughout their career and their gaudy choice of album artwork. In almost all press photos, we see the two band members standing next to each other staring intently at the camera. Their facial hair is usually frenzied, the clothing appears dated, and the background is always entirely unremarkable. One piece of regalia that connects nearly all these photos is the newsboy cap consistently worn by Jim Seals, which when viewed now, only emphasizes how unadventurous and dated their music now sounds. He is in his thirties in these photos, yet appears eligible for a senior discount at the nearest truck stop diner.
In terms of Seals and Crofts’ album covers, the vast majority of them are extremely unflattering. In the beginning of their career, for example on their eponymous debut album, the covers were simply bland photos of the members standing next to each other leering at the camera, but as they gained popularity, this concept metamorphosed to create what might be the least visually pleasing discography of all time. The cover of 1975’s I’ll Play for You shows the duo playing their respective instruments surrounded by a suspiciously-fartlike blue cloud, backed by a close-up shot of their faces superimposed uncomfortably on the top part of the background. It is a ghastly image. The custom font choice for the band’s logo also does them no favors, since it makes the album seem as if it was released two decades prior. For 1976’s Get Closer, the font choice resembles the oft-mocked Comic Sans, while the windblown hair of the band members and primary color palate of their attire signifies a shallow attempt at humor. All of their other album covers only accentuate their lack of visual appeal, occasionally to a horrific degree.
The second cause for Seals and Crofts’ demise is tied to their ideology and the way they not-so-subtley shared these political views with the general public, a sector that was in no way interested in hearing their perspective. This is most clearly seen in the band’s decision, despite Warner’s desperate protests, to title their sixth album Unborn Child. Released in early 1974, the album featured their most sophisticated instrumentation to date, but also marks the point at which the band entirely gave up on obscuring their political views. One listen to the album’s title track reveals that this composition is a far cry from the basic folk schlock of their debut. The song opens with Jimmy Seals singing atop a bell solo designed to sound like a child’s mobile, then at the 17 second mark, a soaring Eagles-esque guitar solo enters the mix atop a platform of blaring horns. Overdramatic guitar flourishes sparkle periodically throughout the rest of the track, and during the outro a 36-piece orchestra is invited to join in on the fun.
The track may sound civilized if you are to ignore the lyrics, but if there is a more ineffectively ostentatious way to share one’s political beliefs with people you’ve never before spoken to, I’m unaware of it. It seems entirely overdone, like nobody summoned up the courage to tell Dash or Jimmy that they weren’t going to change minds simply because they had a more expensive sounding album. The top studio musicians in LA at the time; David Paich on keyboards, David Hungate on bass, and Jeff Porcaro on drums (all of whom would later go on to start Toto), played across the entire album, giving it a sheen only possible when your major label shells out the big bucks to hire the best musicians in the world for the sole purpose of salvaging the abominable music you’ve spent their money in creating. All they accomplished was cheapening the lyrical sentiment.
It is possible that this sheen is what caused their subsequent irreversible career decline. By combining a somewhat controversial viewpoint with the sumptuous instrumentation only a major label like Warner Brothers could afford, they were neither authentic in their proselytizing nor socially accepted. The sinister chorus on Unborn Child’s title track, “Mama stop! Turn around, go back, think it over, Now stop, turn around, go back, think it over, Stop, turn around, go back think it over” was both a semi-misogynistic command and an allegory to their own stylistic direction, since it could be argued that the band ended the “life” of their music by selling out to the smooth reverberations of LA studio musicians. They had courted the sentiments of right-wing evangelism before (see the lyrics of their 1971 track, “Year of Sunday”), but by commenting on the issue of abortion so directly, they were marked by many in the recording industry as religious wack-jobs who had exhausted the entirety of their commercial appeal. When every subsequent Seals and Crofts album failed to yield a hit comparable to 1973’s “Summer Breeze,” these judgments proved true.
The late 70s were a time of social angst for Jimmy Seals, Dash Crofts, their producer Louis Shelton, and the few fans they had left. Sociopolitical issues such as the Iran hostage crisis, the proliferation of disco onto adult contemporary radio stations, and the secularization of society as a whole left the band members distraught, and in response they felt the need to craft a musical retort. What resulted were Seals and Croft’s two weakest albums, 1978’s Takin’ It Easy and 1980’s The Longest Road, the bands final release and whose lack of chart success resulted in them getting dropped entirely from Warner Brothers and breaking up.
On the first of these albums, Takin’ It Easy, Seals and Crofts felt the need to “[go] way down south to Louisiana, close [their] eyes [since] everything's all right,” and “make [their] getaway” (a lyrical excerpt from the track “One More Time”). For publicity reasons, the band members decided to shift their personas from being the descendants of oilmen in the hills of Texas to a more confederate signifier. The album’s conceptual setting is pre-abolition Louisiana, with the album artwork having been photographed at the historic Oak Alley Plantation and all lyricism describing either the plight of 1970s Southern living or generic topics about lovin’ (as exemplified by the song “Nobody Gets Over Lovin’ You”). The lyrical themes of the album were incorporated into the music in a far more dignified manner than the tactless Unborn Child, but it was still a repulsive attempt at integrating their undeniably backwards social values into the context of an overproduced pop album.
1980’s The Longest Road marked a final attempt by the band to capitalize on what little airplay or positive critical reception they continued to have at the end of the 70s. The album’s instrumentation was even more professional (read: synthetic) than the last one, and the lyrical themes somehow less interesting, but due to some unanticipated circumstance, Crofts’ vocals sounded better than they had in almost a decade (I suspect that this was a result of widespread multitracking in the studio and the album having song structures with less vocal exposure, not a result of him actually improving his technique). It is unfortunate, then, that the lowest point of the band’s career occurs at the beginning of side B. The song “Egypt, Israel & America” represents everything wrong with our current era’s culture of conservative megachurch Protestantism, starting with its own punctuation. The inclusion of the comma between “Egypt” and “Israel” and ampersand between “Israel” and “America” imply that the relationships between these countries isn’t equal. Despite spending most of their career waxing poetic about how all of us on the planet earth are from “one family” and that we must “love one another as all people,” Seals and Crofts are still unable to detach themselves from a worldview intent on segregating the Middle East into allies and enemies. They are only able to give us songs that reek of the Sykes-Picot Agreement signed by the British and French half a century earlier.
After three more extremely slight tracks, “The Longest Road,” “I Keep Changing The Faces,” and “Silver Rails,” we reach the final song released by the band in their original incarnation, “One Planet, One People, Please.” A monument to all the verbal excess, posturing, and confident ignorance of the pro-life hippie subculture of the late 70s, it stands today as the most intriguing failure of their career (most of them aren’t intriguing in the slightest). The tune starts with a predictably self-indulgent guitar and mandolin duet, before Seals’ vocals enter with the lyric “Strong is the light of unity.” Crofts then replies with the next line to suggest that this unity can “light the world for you and for me,” then the two band members harmonize by asking “So why don’t we reach out and be one planet, one people, please?” Aside from having questionable grammar, this first verse does nothing but emphasize how ineffective the band was in actually bringing about the social changes they wished to see.
Throughout their run, Seals and Crofts were stuck in an impossible place; too folk-reliant and callously devout to gain a dedicated public audience and convince listeners of their views, yet too ensnared by the intense profit-focus of the recording industry to have any kind of authenticity in their proselytizing. The question we must ask then, is, how much of Seals and Crofts’ music can we rightfully enjoy without feeling as if we are endorsing a regressive and oversimplifying view on the state of the world?
Their discography is, more than anything else, a monument to the devastation that occurs when the profit motives of corporate America intersect with the personal convictions of fraught artists trying to ensure their own economic survival. There is, however, still some kind of appeal that exists beneath their manufactured instrumentation and conservative lyrics. One almost admires the band for the courage they demonstrated by even attempting to bring their rather backwards-focused worldview into the context of major label pop– they certainly had guts. Even on the most basic songs included on their early albums, which have chord progressions so basic they sound like kindergarten singalongs (see “When I Meet Them,” off 1971’s Year of Sunday), the melodies are incessantly catchy, the vocal harmonies constructed with care, and the instrumentation recorded with an almost profane level of clarity. The track “Year of Sunday,” despite being filled with cringeworthy lines about how “God made a pact with Abraham, Abraham gathered his family, and brought his people home,” even includes a short mandolin solo (at 0:51) that could be seen as a precursor to the post-punk-revival scene that developed in the early 2000s in New York City. These brief moments of greatness are precisely why I continue to return to some songs in the Seals and Crofts discography, as they hint at a melodic and harmonic potential only partially realized by the band.
The chord progressions of Seals and Crofts often strike the ultimate balance between melancholia and elation, the basslines are usually interesting, and the inclusion of the mandolin tends to add a nocturnal quality to the songs, yet when the tempos ease, these positive attributes are reduced to merely being addendums to some of the most irritably bland music ever created in the history of American recorded music. Further problems occur when Crofts or Seals decide to tackle a specific issue and turn their lyric sheet into a misinformed treatise on the problems they see within the contemporary world. The band’s final track, “One Planet, One People, Please,” concludes with each member pleading “Please let it be” before they unite in harmony for an overly-drawn-out “Ah.” They implore all of humanity to preserve the positive aspects of their individual cultures as they move forward into an increasingly commodified and culturally integrated world. If only the band had taken this idea to heart.
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