The background music of chain restaurants we grew up with
Before curated brand soundtracks, the background music of the American chain restaurant was a more accidental affair. It came from an overhead system, too loud to ignore and too soft to identify, occupying the adult contemporary register, designed to be audible without being intrusive.
It was not entirely without scientific basis. A landmark 1986 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research by researcher Ronald Milliman found that slow background music in restaurants led diners to stay longer and spend more than fast-tempo music did. The chains did not need to be told twice. This was the same sonic world we covered in our piece on the music that played while your parents shopped at the mall, only here the booths had menus, and someone was eventually going to bring you bread.
A generation absorbed it without noticing. Here are five songs that lived in those speakers.
“Sailing” by Christopher Cross (1980)
Few songs were better engineered for the chain restaurant overhead system than “Sailing”. Christopher Cross won three Grammys for it at the 1981 ceremony, including Record of the Year, beating out Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Frank Sinatra. Its floating, unhurried quality made it a natural fit for any space that wanted music present but not dominant. Cross has said he never expected it to be a hit because it was too introspective. The industry had different ideas.
“Islands in the stream” by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (1983)
The Bee Gees wrote the song for Marvin Gaye, who never recorded it. Barry Gibb brought it to Kenny Rogers, who recorded it with Dolly Parton. The result simultaneously topped the Hot 100, the Country chart, and the Adult Contemporary chart. The warmth of the pairing and the unhurried pace made it a natural for restaurant speakers, and it found them everywhere.
“Hello” by Lionel Richie (1984)
No song accumulated more restaurant speaker time per decade than “Hello”. It spent three weeks at number 1 on the Hot 100. At Sizzler, at Denny’s, at IHOP, wherever families sat in booths and waited for food in the Reagan years, this song was already playing when they arrived.
“Up where we belong” by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes (1982)
Written for An Officer and a Gentleman, the single won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1983 and reached number 1 on the Hot 100. Cocker’s ragged baritone against Warnes’s clarity gave the song a textural contrast that set it apart from the smoother adult contemporary fare around it. Throughout the mid-1980s, it was a fixture of the casual dining soundtrack, the kind of song that stopped conversation for a moment when the chorus arrived.
“We’ve only just begun” by The Carpenters (1970)
Originally written as a bank commercial, the recording became one of the Carpenters’ most enduring tracks. Richard and Karen heard it in a Crocker Bank television ad and contacted the songwriters immediately. It reached number 2 on the Hot 100 in 1970 and remained in rotation for decades. By the time the chain restaurants of the 1980s were at their peak, it had long since become part of the ambient furniture of American commercial life.
Wrap up
The music in those restaurants was not chosen for its artistic merit. It was chosen to keep people comfortable and to fill the silence without demanding attention. By design or by accident, it did something more. It lodged itself permanently in the memories of everyone who sat in those booths. Decades later, a single bar of any of these songs can put you right back at that table.
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