A family thing: Seals & Crofts 2 at the Palladium

The most successful acoustic duo of the 1970s, Seals & Crofts left a legacy of classic songs including “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl,” “I’ll Play For You” and “We May Never Pass This Way (Again).” The pair parted ways in 1980, after selling nearly 7 million albums.

Appearing at the Palladium Theater Thursday, July 13, Seals & Crofts 2 deliver the best-loved songs of Jim Seals and Dash Crofts, but this is no tribute act. Brady Seals, a founding member of the platinum-selling country band Little Texas, is Jim Seals’ cousin. And Lua Crofts’ father is none other than Dash Crofts.

In fact, it was Dash’s suggestion that this all-in-the-family twosome be dubbed Seals & Crofts 2.

“When people get there and sit down with us, and they let us sing to them, I think they recognize that we have our own musicianship,” explains Lua Crofts. “I don’t think it feels like a tribute bands as much as it feels like we’re honoring my dad and my uncle Jimmy – and taking them back to when the music was amazing and innocent and free.”

They’ve been performing together for five years. “As soon as people understand that we are directly related, they get it,” Seals says. “And it’s kind of a pleasant surprise for them.”

There’s much more to their show, which includes a second guitarist and a drummer. “We do a couple of covers, we do two or three brand-new original songs, and then of course I play some of the hits from Little Texas,” offers Seals. “It’s hard not to play those big songs in a show setting.”

They also pay tribute to country artist “England “ Dan Seals, Jimmy’s brother.

The extended Seals family also produced songwriter Troy Seals (“Seven Spanish Angels,” “Lost in the Fifties Tonight”).

That blood-relative resume was the impetus for the formation of Seals & Crofts 2. “I wanted to do what I called a Seals Family Album – excuse the pun – where I would re-cut three songs by Jimmy, three by Dan, three by Troy and then three of mine,” says Seals. “It’s something that I’ve really thought about over the years.”

On one of Seals’ first post-Little Texas shows, Lua Crofts had been one of his background singers. He called her up and suggested they try ‘Summer Breeze’ for the album project. “We started singing and immediately we were like ‘Uh-oh … this is really cool.’

“So we put the Seals Family Album thing to the side and started to learn some of the classics like ‘Diamond Girl’ and ‘Get Closer.’ It started out acoustically, and then we got a band. And an agent. It really took off organically from a solo project.”

Crofts was a small child when her father and Jimmy Seals wrote and recorded “Ruby Jean and Billie Lee,” a love song to their wives. In the chorus, the men sang their children’s names.

She was “horribly shy,” she says, and really hated the attention. “When that came on, and they sang my name, I would just run into the other room. I was humiliated.”

The Crofts family bloodline, too, was full of musicians and music-business people. Her grandmother was Marcia Day, one of the first female powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll managers.

Eventually, Crofts reports, “I discovered my own passion for music. When I was about 16 or 17 I really started to explore it. I moved back to L.A. from Tennessee at 18, and I dove into the studio-musician group. I became a studio singer. I sang on records for a bunch of different people, and I toured the world. I had a great time, in my 20s, doing what everyone in my family had been doing.”

And so she came full circle. “Now, being a grown woman and going back and listening to their music, and now performing their music, I have just fallen apart with my emotions, my feelings and my love for what I didn’t even get as a child. I sing their songs and I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea that they were this brilliant. They were poets.’”

Brady, she says, “is an incredible musician, and he’s such a great singer. I think I’m very much like my dad in that Jimmy, in Seals & Crofts, did a lot of the lead vocals. And my dad did a lot of the harmonies, and was just great and masterful at that. And I think that I kind of picked that up from my dad. I love singing harmonies.

“Our voices just click. I think maybe it’s the Seals & Crofts genetics. Also, I can hear him, I know what he’s going to do, I know how’s he going to phrase, and I follow his lead. And it just works.”

Seals agrees. “There’s just something with the timbre of the voices, the vibrato that happens at the same time, it’s the volume when you come in and out of phrases,” he says. “There’s all kinds of variables to harmonies and blending together.

“And for some reason or the other, I’m able to blend with Lua, and she can blend with me. And it’s just a really cool thing.”

Find tickets at the Palladium website here.

Jim Seals, left, and Dash Crofts.