History · America’s Greatest Hits

You know these songs whether you meant to or not. A Horse With No Name, Ventura Highway, Sister Golden Hair, Tin Man. America made soft rock that got into the water supply in the early seventies and never quite left. George Martin produced a good chunk of it, which is a strange sentence but explains why the later stuff sits so clean.

A Horse With No Name is still the one people argue about, mostly whether it’s about anything at all. Ventura Highway is the best thing here, all jangle and free-wheeling nonsense. Sister Golden Hair does the George Harrison slide-guitar move and gets away with it.

Then there’s Muskrat Love, which I will not defend. Every comp has one. The rest holds up better than a band this gentle has any right to. Twelve songs, no skips except the obvious one, harmonies you could set a watch by.