From garage-band singles to the King of the Movie Soundtrack

Kenneth Clark Loggins was born in Everett, Washington, in 1948, the youngest of three brothers, and grew up mostly in Alhambra, California. His brother Bobby shared his birthday, and the story goes that the baby was first named Clark Kent Loggins before his first and middle names were flipped and Kent became Kenneth. He graduated from San Gabriel Mission High School in 1966.

His first band was The Second Helping, from Alhambra, which released singles on Viva Records in the late sixties. One of them, “Floating Downstream on an Inflatable Rubber Raft”, was picked as a newcomer by Cash Box, and the garage-pop writer Greg Shaw praised the group's “excellent punky folk-pop records”. After a short stint playing guitar for the New Improved Electric Prunes, Loggins wrote four songs for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's album Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy, and in Gator Creek he made the first recorded version of “Danny's Song”.

That song later became a hit for Anne Murray, and by then Loggins had teamed up with Jim Messina. As Loggins and Messina they recorded seven albums between 1972 and 1977. After that, he went solo and found his calling in film: his soundtrack work goes back to A Star Is Born in 1976, and he is known as the “King of the Movie Soundtrack”. His song “Footloose” earned an Academy Award nomination in 1985. Among the songs in the playlist are “This Is It”, “Heart to Heart”, “I Believe in Love” and and “Whenever I Call You Friend”.

His achievements include two Grammy Awards and a Daytime Emmy Award, and nominations for an Academy Award, a Tony Award and a Golden Globe. Later he formed the group Blue Sky Riders with Gary Burr and Georgia Middleman, and released Finally Home in 2013. It is a long, curving career, and the thread is easy to see: a songwriter with a gift for melody, who learned early to shape a song to the story in front of him.