Adult Contemporary

Adult Contemporary. AC, for short.

In 1979, the American music magazine Billboard renamed its Easy Listening chart Adult Contemporary. In the decades that followed, AC broadened its musical horizons and established itself as a category that endures to this day.

Yet its boundaries remain elusive. Soft rock, soul, jazz, bossa nova, country— music from very different traditions finds a home under the AC umbrella. What, then, draws it all together?

One answer lies in the evolution of recording technology, and in the gifted engineers and studio musicians who brought its possibilities to life. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, they explored new equipment and techniques, creating fresh textures and a new sense of space in recorded sound.

Music had entered an era in which how a record sounded mattered as much as what was played. Those innovations transformed the art of making records. Their influence is still with us.

Paul Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, Chicago, Billy Joel, the Carpenters, Bread, Norah Jones.

And behind so much of this music stand songwriters and producers whose contributions deserve equal recognition: Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, Tommy LiPuma, David Foster.

Their music captivated listeners far beyond America. In Japan, musicians were equally drawn to the new sounds arriving from across the Pacific. They eagerly absorbed the recording techniques and musical ideas they heard, then reshaped them through their own sensibilities into something distinctly their own.

Part of that legacy became known in Japan as AOR—Adult-Oriented Rock. It would, in turn, form a vital strand of the music we now collectively call city pop.