Dean Friedman

Dean Friedman scored one of the great one-hit AM wonders of the 1970s with "Ariel," a soft rock satire of the suburbs. The song climbed to 26 in 1977, right when the Billboard charts were filled with ambitious singer/songwriters and smooth, supple soft rock, and Friedman's eponymous debut straddled those two extremes. He never managed to replicate that success in America -- in the U.K., he'd take "Lucky Stars," a duet with Denise Marsa, to number three in 1978 -- but his clever songcraft earned him a cult following that he would later parlay into work as a jingle writer. Later still, he'd maintain that cult through steady tours and late-career efforts like Submarine Races (2010) and American Lullaby (2021).