16 Soft Rockers with Weirdly Good Style

Photo by: amazon.com

"That" Doobie Brother

Your Mom Loves: "Listen to the Music"
I Love: Arrowed, Doobie's sad eyes and tease of chest hair

Photo by: amazon.com

How do you know when you're turning into your mother? When you fantasize about the same people she did, in 1981. Jackson Browne is one of a handful of singer/songwriters I used to block out with a Walkman as a kid in the backseat of my parents car. Now in his 60's he's back on tour this summer and all I can think of how to get backstage. I came around to 70's emo singers a few years back--thanks to the delicate confluence of insomnia, heartbreak and a particularly moving Time/Life collection infomercial. But only recently, have I embraced the fact that I want to harvest their children, the old-fashioned way.

I don't care that they sing about making slow and steady love, that their music makes mom's do the Bar Mitzvah dance, that their song titles are projected in commercials in front of the same footage used in adds for Mt. Airy Lodge. There's just something about a sensitive '70's singer-songwriter who's not afraid to cheapen his music by showing a little chest hair on his album cover. Nothing wrong with that at all.