A lot of people love soft rock. But no one can agree on what it is.
That confusion shapes the three-part music documentary series Sometimes When We Touch: The Reign, Ruin & Resurrection Of Soft Rock. It's an incredibly vast subject, so producers opt to split the story of the genre into three parts. The rise of Soft Rock, thanks in part to the success of the influential Los Angeles radio station KNX-FM. The inevitable decline of the genre as it predictably fell out of fashion. And its rise again as new fans began to appreciate the music decades after its initial success.
As is often the case with this type of music documentary, there are tons of snippets from various musicians, fans and cultural observers, who talk about the songs and the impact it had on their lives. There are a lot of fun moments, from L.A. Reid singing a snippet of "The Pina Colada Song to a lively discussion of the impact the Fender Rhodes had on the music. And there are a few pointless appearances as well, including some random comments from Drew Barrymore.
While parts of the documentary are so lightweight they might float away if they weren't tied down, what makes it worth watching are the stories behind the songs. Player's Peter Beckett describes how he wrote "Baby Come Back" after he came home from a tour of Japan to discover his wife had left. He says he started singing the lyrics as he walked around his empty house. His band got a hit out the experience, although he never saw his wife again.
Dan Hill talks about being 19 and in love with an older woman of 22. He had never really been in love and the experience inspired him to write "Sometimes When We Touch." He played the song to her over the phone and her response was to tell him he was way too intense for her. And then she moved in with a football player.
But the most jarring stories come from Toni Tennille, who fronted the massively successful duo The Captain and Tennille with husband Daryl Dragon. While they looked like the perfect couple from the outside, it was far from an idyllic marriage.
In her segment, Tennille admits that he never told her that he loved her. "It was hard," she says. "The first few years I kept hoping. Hoping that there would be a breakthrough or something. I always thought Daryl was a genius. He was an odd duck, boy. But he was a genius. Maybe it was some form of autism. I don't know. I never understood it."
"I couldn't make him fall in love with me," she continued. "I hoped he would. But as the years went by, I realized that he was not capable of that. And then I was kind of stuck. I just went along with it. I know he admired me tremendously. He admired my talent, my voice, my gift for writing. He was just closed up and he couldn't open up to any kind of emotion."
"I was kind of a hot dish in those days," she explained. "But throughout that entire relationship with Daryl, I never, ever cheated on him. I never had an affair. He was the only man that interested me. And even though I couldn't have him the way I wanted him, when I would have dreams, erotic dreams, he was the guy in the dreams.
That loveless marriage inspired one of the duo's biggest hits and it's impossible to hear "The Way I Want To Touch You" the same way after knowing the backstory of the tune.
"I never wanted to love a man/the way that I want to love you."
"It was our second hit and I wanted to express how I felt about Daryl. He was everything to me," she explains. "This was early on, when I still thought I could get through to him. But I was never able to. And I kept thinking. 'Why are you doing this? Why are you still with him?' I kept worrying about all of our fans. So that's why I stuck with him."
Those segments make Sometimes When We Touch a must-see docu-series for Soft Rock fans. But to be honest, I wish producers had just opted to make a series focusing on the real-life stories behind-the-songs instead of trying to force some over-arching theme about Soft Rock into three episodes.
Still, it's a great way to spend three hours - whether you've been a fan of the music since back in the day or you've fallen in love with it thanks to your parents or even grandparents.
Sometimes When We Touch: The Reign, Ruin & Resurrection Of Soft Rock is currently streaming on Paramount+