Deep Dive: Seals & Crofts, SUMMER BREEZE

45 years ago today, Dan Seals and Dash Crofts – known collectively as Seals & Crofts – released the album that would serve both as their commercial breakthrough and, indeed, the defining album of their entire career.

Produced by Louie Shelton, who had also helmed the duo’s previous album, 1971’s YEAR OF SUNDAY, a.k.a. their Warner Brothers Records debut, SUMMER BREEZE proved so much more successful than its predecessor that a man-on-the-street poll would almost certainly find that most people think it’s actually their debut album. In fact, they’d been recording as a duo since 1969, which is when they released their actual debut (a self-titled affair), and they followed with their sophomore effort, DOWN HOME, in 1970.

The success of SUMMER BREEZE, however, blew everything Seals and Crofts had done up to that point completely out of the water, hitting #7 on the Billboard 200 and going platinum. That success, of course, can be attributed heavily to the album’s title track, which provided them with a #6 hit on the Hot 100 as well as a #4 hit on the Adult Contemporary Singles chart. In addition, the album’s second single, “Hummingbird,” climbed to #20 on the Hot 100 and #12 on the Adult Contemporary Singles chart, confirming that the duo was in it for the long haul, success-wise.

In subsequent years, Seals & Crofts would deliver unto the world two further singles that matched the success of “Summer Breeze” – “Diamond Girl” and “Get Closer,” both of which went to #6 – but if you try another one of those man-on-the-street polls and ask people to name Seals & Crofts’ biggest hit, we can guarantee that their answer is going to be “Summer Breeze.” It’s a classic track, to be sure, and the album it hails from is pretty darned swell, too.