Smooth: Music That Is Easy to Listen to, from the Middle of the Road to Everywhere

by Paul Hegarty

Smooth explores the ways in which music has sought to be easy, approachable, comforting and beguiling in its accessibility.

From easy listening and exotica in the 1950s through jazz fusion, new age music, ambient and chill out, K-Pop, AOR and MOR, Japanese city pop and performance of high emotion alongside the warm and mellow bath of adult contemporary, Smooth analyses what easy listening can be across a range of often very poorly-defined genres. Global in scope, Smooth covers the music of the culture industry as aspiring to the universal and timeless, and evaluates how easy (and eased) listening works and how it affects the listener.

256 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication August 19, 2027

About the author

Paul Hegarty is an author, musician, and lecturer in aesthetics at University College Cork. He performs in the noise band Safe and is involved in running the experimental music record label dotdotdotmusic.