Daryl Hall

One of the great soul singers of his generation, Daryl Hall also was an inventive pop/rock songwriter, both on his own and in conjunction with his lifelong creative partner, John Oates. Hall & Oates took a long road to success, starting as a folk-rock duo at the dawn of the 1970s, then winding through soft AM pop and prog rock before striking pay dirt with the smooth soul of “Sara Smile”. “Rich Girl” gave the duo their first number one in 1977, then they entered their wilderness years as they figured out how to thread modern rock into the soul. The new wave R&B of “Maneater,” “Kiss on My List,” “You Make My Dreams,” and “Private Eyes” made Daryl Hall & John Oates superstars in the early ‘80s, and once their imperial phase would down in 1986, Hall stepped out on his own with Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine, an adventurous record co-produced with David A. Stewart and T-Bone Wolk. From this point on, Hall alternated his solo projects with collaborations and tours with John Oates, discovering a second career as a talk show host via his online series “Live from Daryl’s House”, which debuted in 2007. Highlights from the show were collected alongside selections from his solo career on the 2022 compilation Before After. 

 
A pop savant who fastidiously avoided easy categorization throughout the course of his career, Todd Rundgren straddled the gap separating a mainstream star from a cult figure. Rundgren had plenty of hits in the 1970s and ‘80s, many of them becoming enduring contemporary standards, such as the Carole King pastiche “I Saw The Light,” the ballads, “Hello, It’s Me” and “Can We Still Be Friends,” plus the goofy novelty “Bang on the Drum All Day.” These hits displayed his sharp commercial instincts, impulses he’d wind up subverting and tweaking on such heady ‘70s LPs as Something/Anything, A Wizard, A True Star, and Todd, records at the core of a discography that attracted a cult audience and stayed faithful for decades.