Crowdsourced Song Of The Day 3/18/2013: Bread - "London Bridge"

Today's CSOTD comes to us from the ever-reliable Sean Brown, who is really outperforming the lot of you. Get those numbers up, folks, the boys in accounting are making way too many Grumpy Cat memes. Bread was the quintessential example of 1970's "soft rock," a form that's frequently maligned, and with good reason. If I'm gonna ride a horse, it damn well better have a name, know what I mean? But Bread was a huge exception. David Gates and Jimmy Griffin, for one thing, were tight songwriters. Gates sang with a great sense of fragility, and even if he wrote songs drenched in sentiment, the way he sang them earned him the right to indulge in vulnerability. I mean, compare Bread's version of "If" to Telly Savalas'. Bread wins. It's not even close.

Anyway, try it for yourself if you don't believe me. Listen to the iconic collection The Best Of Bread. There are some moderate rockers and power pop songs on there if you need a palette cleanser. "London Bridge" isn't on that compilation, because I don't play the hits here unless the collective conscious has forgotten them. But it's a fine encapsulation of the Bread ethic that packs a lot of nice sounds into barely two and a half minutes.

And also, the Ken Boothe reggae version of "Everything I Own" rules. Thanks, Sean!