Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ on Paramount+, A Doc That Observes The Rise And Legacy Of The ‘70s Soft Rock Sound

Sometimes When We Touch (Paramount+) is a three-episode docu series that explores soft rock, the super seventies genre of pop music that blended sensitive lyrics, feathered hair, and open-collar rayon shirts with smooth harmonies, piano leads, and memorable melodies. The MTV Studios production combines narration and archival footage with contemporary interviews, both with those who were there and those who still remember the songs, from Kenny Loggins, Marilyn McCoo and Toni Tennile to Sheryl Crow, LA Reid, Big Boi, and Stewart Copeland.  

SOMETIMES WHEN WE TOUCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “Where did soft rock come from?” a narrator asks rhetorically, and images appear of 1960s protests for social justice, anti war riots in the early 70s, helicopter door gunners over the rice paddies of Vietnam, and “Richard ‘Goddamn’ Nixon.” 

The Gist: “It was kind of laid back, ‘We’re just gonna take everything down a notch’ — it’s almost like everybody was slightly stoned, and they probably were.” That’s Bangles cofounder Susanna Hoffs in Sometimes When We Touch on the soft rock sound as it began to permeate the Billboard music charts in the early to mid-1970s, when artists like The Carpenters, Barry Manilow, Player, Bread, Orleans, and Dan Hill (Hill’s 1977 ballad “Sometimes When We Touch” is a worthy stylistic touch point to reference as a doc title) broke through on the Hot 100, Easy Listening, and R&B charts with music that was often an amalgam of genres and smoother, more sensitive, and melodically stacked in general. As America was embracing its quieter side, its yoga side, its exotic cocktails and cheeky references to infidelity side — Rupert Holmes hit #1 in 1979 with “Escape (The Pina Colada Song) — soft rock became its soundtrack.

The format here is akin to a VH1 documentary. A narrator connects phrases like a “tsunami of softness to heal from ’60s chaos” with what became the yacht rock tool kit: piano instead of guitar, a subtle backbeat known as the “Doobie Bounce” after the R&B grooves of songs like  “What a Fool Believes,” track after multi-layered track of vocal harmonies,, and a reckoning with themes of love and emotion, often rendered in confessional first person. Richard Marx is on hand to describe the influence of Rhodes keys over the entire genre, an instrument that softened the traditional tone of a piano. “It’s sexier,” Marx says. “It’s like if you created a hybrid between an acoustic piano and vibes.” Billy Joel understood the Rhodes’ power, taking the warm sound of “Just the Way You Are” to the top ten in 1977.

Artists of the era appear here — Ray Parker, Jr. probably deserves his own specific documentary, if only to hear more stories of his tours with Stevie Wonder and The Rolling Stones as a teenage guitar wunderkind — but Sometimes When We Touch tends to resonate most when musicians of today give props to these sounds from the ’70s. LA Reid says radio was his “introduction to all of these beautiful songs,” while Sheryl Crow gravitated to the smooth acoustic grooves of Bread as a roller skating teenager. She even sings a few bars of “Baby I’m-a Want You.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Leon Russell’s prodigious output isn’t really considered soft rock. But Les Blank shot his Russell doc A Poem Is a Naked Person in the mid-’70s, and its visual and ideological ramble offers valuable perspective on music and culture in the Me Decade. But for a pioneering, revealing, and often hilarious exploration of the smooth music in this era, look no further than the legendary YouTube series Yacht Rock, whose own “Hollywood” Steve Huey and David B. Lyons appear in Sometimes When We Touch. 

Our Take: Sometimes When We Touch is subtitled “the reign, ruin, and resurrection of soft rock,” and those prompts also serve as episode headings. And in “Reign,” it’s interesting to track the genre’s surge in popularity as a function of the radio business instead of record labels or the collective bloom of a particular sound or scene, such as what would later occur with the emergence of disco and punk rock. The program director of LA radio outlet KNX-FM made mellow jams cool, the format was picked up by stations nationwide, and the music industry surfed the soft rock wave as it crested wide on existing 1970s cultural trends. Given the “ruin” of what will come next in Sometimes, when MTV instead becomes the barometer of pop music’s sound and influence, and what the doc seems to see as soft rock’s “resurrection” — as the sound is later filtered through the prism of hip-hop sampling, or finds its way onto the handpicked soundtracks of James Gunn’s superhero movies — it’s easy to overlook that soft rock’s big Me Decade moment might mark the very last time radio was a force multiplier for culture the way TikTok trends are in the third decade of the 21st century. 

It would also have been nice if Sometimes When We Touch went a little longer on how soft rock was a reaction to the social turbulence of the 1960s and early ’70s, a point it introduces with footage of the Vietnam war and Jimi Hendrix wigging out on his electric guitar in 1967, but doesn’t probe much further beyond the Carpenters getting dragged as flunkies for notorious square President Nixon or the later election of “warm and fuzzy” Jimmy Carter. When your documentary features writer and NPR music critic Ann Powers plugging soft rock into The Joy of Sex and the evolving sexual mores of America in the ’70s, or brilliantly tracing the Captain & Tennille’s shimmery sound through film soundtrack atmosphere and lounge singer intimacy, you should give Powers more space to cook. Sometimes When We Touch spreads across three episodes. But it can often feel like a superficial survey.

Sex and Skin: Sexuality became an open subject in the 1970s, with changing ideas about approach and presentation, and part of that, as John DeVore, creator of the Medium pop culture blog Humungus puts it, was a “re-negotiation of what it means to be macho.” Sometimes When We Touch illustrates this with a montage of men taking it all off for album art in the soft rock era, be it Orleans’ Waking and Dreaming or the porn-adjacent glisten Pablo Cruise sported on the cover of their 1975 record Lifeline.

Parting Shot: “A rumbling threat was about to make its historic launch and land a fatal blow to the soft-rock empire.” MTV’s 1981 debut would signal a major readjustment in the cyclic rate of popular music, and over footage of Madonna and Michael Jackson, Sometimes When We Touch foreshadows its second episode, fittingly entitled “Ruin.” 

Sleeper Star: For a brief but intriguing moment, Sometimes When We Touch makes a case for the biological encoding of soft rock as a genre full of the sads. Musicologist Nolan Gasser of the streaming service Pandora breaks it down. “From a neurological standpoint, when we listen to sad music, it actually can release a hormone called prolactin, which calms the body. We’re experiencing this sadness without actually being sad.”

Most Pilot-y Line: “It sounds like rock, but it tastes like pop.” Combine that notion with soft rock willingly absorbing elements of R&B, jazz, latin music, folk, and country, and the style’s sonic profile begins to take form. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sometimes When We Touch will have you humming along with some of the more resonant jams of the soft rock canon even if as a documentary it doesn’t go too much deeper than surface level. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges