The Byrds is one of my GOAT bands and in terms of mellow stuff, I love Beach Boys as well. Buffalo Springfield, CSN&Y, Neil Young, Love, Zombies, Big Star, Jellyfish, Posies, Cardigans, Eggstone etc.-there's a shitload of soft stuff I dig

>Do you spend much listening time with
>Gram Parsons,

Yes

> The Beatles
I like Revolver

> Tom Petty, Springsteen,

Big NO on both even if Petty made some pretty dope power-pop in the 70's...

>Fleetwood Mac?

I prefer the Peter Green era (not so much the albums but the singles and B-sides)-the slick 70's stuff is not my thing...
>

>I generally tend toward harsher music myself, but growing up
>in America (and specifically in the Midwest), listening to
>some pop and rock radio as well as my parents' folk and soft
>rock records, I do have a taste for that style when it's done
>well. I think Tweedy writes really good songs influenced by
>most of the people I just named, and experiments just enough
>to push it well away from overly polished Eagles territory.
>But at the same time, some days I would much rather listen to
>Jesus Lizard, Fugazi, or Darkthrone and Suffocation.

Teh problem with "softer" rock (and a lot of harder trock too of course) in the past two decades is that it has gone in a "texture-music" direction; people get blown away by all the little details and creativity in the arrangements and "interesting" sounds and it feels like prog-rock again, just in a vertical sense rather than a horizontal one. The love for Radiohead, Flaming Lips and post-early records Wilco is an example of this.

Harder rock has done a better job at avoiding the pitfalls of this approach since it is SO closely tied to the guitar/bass/drums set-up and for all the weaknesses that approach has in terms of dynamics and texture, it IMO MORE than make up for that in terms of riffs, song-structures, cool patterns etc.; basically, stuff I consider far more substantial than Wilco putting some bleeps in a stadiumrock song or Radiohead discovering dubstep...