Soft Rock Burned Out With These 5 Songs

You could hardly spin a radio dial in the '70s and '80s without latching onto a handful of soft rock radio stations. It was a reasonable progression for artists who catered to a gentler (and often older) audience. Their musical sensibilities may have seemed fashionable in earlier years, but the modest rock-based edges had gradually rounded down to a smooth, slushy groove. Once hip-hop and alt-rock began shaking up the system, soft rock did a gradual burnout until it fell off the collective playlist entirely.

What were the signs that soft rock had started its death spiral? We say it was when the songs took on more self-importance than self-awareness, with lyrics that were supremely precious and arrangements that were earnest to a fault. Soft rock generally offered songs so corny they made our ears burn. But the genre got so overwrought at the end, the songs began to feel like parodies. Sure, we sang along at the top of our lungs, but we knew the genre had jumped the shark. We were just holding onto the fin and enjoying the ride.

Certain songs that rolled in at the end of the '80s and even in the late-'90s clung to the soft rock format, even though it was showing signs of sunsetting. Let's revisit five of the most noteworthy soft rock songs that signaled the end of an era, a cringe-worthy collection that made our teeth ache and our eyes roll as soft rock went the way of the dodo.

Richard Marx helped bury soft rock with a supreme arch ballad called "Right Here Waiting." It drizzled out of speakers in grocery stores and physician waiting rooms everywhere in 1989, a syrupy love song about undying devotion delivered without a drop of irony. By August of that year, it was a No. 1 hit that helped seal the fate of the format, appealing to an audience that would soon be moving on to feistier sounds.

Marx wrote the song for his then-girlfriend, dancer-actor Cynthia Rhodes, while she was abroad shooting a film. As the legend goes, Marx finished the writing in all of 20 minutes. The overly-simple piano figure that forms the chorus and makes a motif throughout the single plods mechanically while Marx croons lines like "If I see you next to never / How can we say forever?" And "Oh, can't you see it, baby / You've got me going crazy." It's high-school mooning at its most commercial, and yet it seemed to help Marx and Rhodes maintain a 25-year marriage (though they split up in 2014). 

All matrimonial longevity aside, Marx's more upbeat offerings like the Eagles-esque "Don't Mean Nothing" and "Should've Known Better" were far sturdier offerings that showed the singer-songwriter had plenty of talent. But "Right Here Waiting" was like a heart monitor beeping a single steady tone, letting the world know soft rock was gently passing into that good night.

Oh, the drama is palpable in 1987's "Hands to Heaven" by British popsters Breathe. Lyrics that implore a lover to pray that this insufferable separation isn't permanent, hushed electro tones that aim for a smooth and soulful soundscape, and a singer who exaggerates every emotional note. It even has a seedy air of gaslighting, as if the over-emoting of singer and co-writer David Glasper is a manipulation meant to pull his paramour closer for one final canoodle.

As unsubstantial as it was, the song managed to drift all the way up to No. 2 on the charts, giving the band its only hit record. That's probably because the mode Breathe worked in was already a dinosaur on its last legs, just waiting for the crash-landing meteor to put it out of its misery.

And yet, Breathe pushed out another super-soft ballad called "How Can I Fall?" the following year. It had only slightly more backbone than "Hands to Heaven" and reassured the music world that the burn-out of soft rock was no accident, even if there were more beacons yet to come.

Mid-'80s Bryan Adams was a crunchy guitar-oriented rock 'n' roll guy with "Cuts Like a Knife" and the nostalgic sing-along song with a sexy hidden meaning "Summer of '69." But in the '90s, Adams shifted in the direction of soft-rock stallion Kenny Loggins and became a Hollywood soundtrack balladeer, churning out songs as edgy as tapioca pudding. The first of these syrupy love themes, the overly-titled "Everything I Do (I Do it for You)," was a mighty accelerant on the soft rock burn-out.

Accompanying 1991's widely panned film "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," this schmaltzy love song threw everything it could on the table: insipid lyrics, heartfelt over-singing, a cinematic key change, and an ultra-dramatic ending custom-made for closing out a wedding couple's first dance. It was as if decades of soft rock artistry had all been shoved into one transparent sack of heartache and devotion.

Audiences ate it up at the time, driving the single to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven soft-rockin' weeks. It even earned an Oscar nomination, though it lost the award to another low point of soft-rock sogginess, the love theme from Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." It also set the mushy tone for similar Bryan Adams songs from other movies. Little did he know, he'd lit the fuse that would detonate what remained of the soft rock movement — or maybe he knew and was fine just collecting the checks.

You may not think of Bette Midler as a particularly controversial performer, but in the early days, when she was playing bathhouses and filling her stage shows with flirtatious raunch, she was quite the showbiz rebel. She proved she could handle the soft rock format when she pulled off an award-winning performance of the theme song from "The Rose" in 1979. Then, after a decade of making comedies and cutesy live-action films for Disney, Midler hammered a nail in the soft rock coffin with the ultimate tearjerker, "Wind Beneath My Wings." It was all downhill from there.

Midler's version was another soundtrack slurper that played over the credits of her mawkish 1988 drama, "Beaches." It was a cover of a song recorded by pop siren Sheena Easton, R&B legend Gladys Knight, and soul singer Lou Rawls, all following on one another's heels between 1982 and 1983. Each time it passed hands, it seemed to gather more lacquer, until Midler blasted it with a final coat of soft rock sheen that couldn't be topped. The song became a No. 1 smash and won Grammys for Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Once Midler had wrung all the emotion she could out of the lyrics and melody, there was little else any other artist could do to the song. It had been mashed to pulp, yet another indicator of the quickly dissolving soft rock genre, albeit a wildly successful one.

There was nothing savage about Savage Garden's maudlin sopper, "Truly Madly Deeply," a tune that came complete with a quavering vocal performance and lyrics that sounded like eighth-grade poetry. It was worlds away from the bands initial single "I Want You," a groove-driven slice of electro pop sunshine that tossed out rapid-fire rap-lite lyrics that included the unforgettable phrase "Sweet like a chic-a-cherry cola." Now that song was a fun time.

But "Truly Madly Deeply" was a real bummer of a latecomer to the soft rock party, arriving in 1997 after the balloons had all been popped and the confetti had been swept away. The band seemed to be trying to give soft rock a modern resurrection. But a laughable chorus like "I wanna stand with you on a mountain / I wanna bathe with you in the sea / I wanna lay like this forever / Until the sky falls down on me" was more than just a reminder that soft rock had taken a permanent downturn. It was practically an underwater fireworks display letting music fans know that the genre couldn't be revived. It provided a singable soft rock death rattle, if nothing else.

And yet somehow, the song went to No. 1 in the U.S., Australia, and Canada and was ranked the greatest Adult Contemporary song ever by American Billboard. Ironically, it's also the epitaph on the soft rock headstone. Rest well, soft rock; we hardly knew ye.