Into The Music
Dash Crofts, the guitarist and vocalist best known as one half of the soft-rock duo Seals and Crofts, died on March 25, 2026. He was 87. A family member confirmed the news, citing complications from heart surgery. His partner Jim Seals passed away in 2022, and now the duo that gave 1970s radio its most breezy, sunlit quality is gone entirely.
Seals and Crofts were not critics’ darlings. They were something more interesting: they were inescapable. “Summer Breeze,” the song the duo released in 1972, is one of those pieces of music that has outlasted any critical assessment of it. The melody is so simple it feels inevitable. Crofts’ mandolin runs through the song like a stream through tall grass. It has been covered by Isley Brothers, sampled by countless producers, and it still sounds like a specific temperature, a specific afternoon light.
The duo formed in the late 1960s in California after years of playing in various bands as supporting musicians. They initially organized themselves around the Bahai Faith, a spiritual practice both men had adopted, and for a brief period performed under the name the Dawnbreakers. That project faded, and Seals and Crofts emerged as a dedicated two-man outfit, built around their own songs and their own intertwined sense of melody.
They signed with Warner Bros in 1971 and immediately found an audience. The album Year of the Sunday charted, but Summer Breeze, their 1972 follow-up, made them stars. Lead single “Summer Breeze” reached No. 4 on the Adult Contemporary chart and planted itself permanently in American pop consciousness. “Diamond Girl” came the following year and did the same thing. The duo released albums at a furious pace through the 1970s, sometimes putting out two records in a single year.
They also courted controversy in ways that feel strange in retrospect. Their 1974 song “Unborn Child” was an explicit anti-abortion statement delivered in the same warm, pastoral tones as everything else they recorded. It reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 despite (or perhaps because of) the uproar it generated. Seals and Crofts were rarely content to be simply pleasant, even when pleasant was their primary mode.
The duo broke up in 1981, reunited briefly in the early 1990s, then returned again for their final album, Traces, in 2004. Crofts also recorded a solo record, Today, in 1998. He remained close to Seals even after Seals suffered a stroke in 2017. When Seals died in 2022, Crofts had already lost his oldest musical partner.
Crofts played guitar and mandolin throughout his career. His instrument work gave Seals and Crofts a distinctly textured sound, warmer and more acoustic than most of what was dominating radio at the time. The soft-rock wave of the 1970s produced plenty of forgettable records. Seals and Crofts made a handful that have genuinely lasted, not because they were ahead of their time or especially sophisticated, but because they were very good at the specific thing they were trying to do. “Summer Breeze” still holds. That is no small thing.
Man, Seals and Crofts is a name I haven’t seen in ages. Proper soft rock, that. Rest easy to him. “Summer Breeze” was on every mum’s playlist in the 90s whether she knew who made it or not.
“Summer Breeze” , I must have been ten years old the first time I heard that song, in my aunt’s car in Martinique with the windows down, and I had no idea what I was hearing but it felt like the air itself was singing. Soft rock gets dismissed so easily but there is a gentleness to the best of it that takes real craft to achieve. Dash Crofts understood how to make space inside a song, how to let it breathe. That is not nothing. That is everything, actually. Rest well.