It doesn’t appear obvious to me that Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins and Barbara Streisand have anything romantic, in the academic definition of the term.
Listened to those clips, and it sounds like normal music, just a bit lyric, but IMK, lyricism did not start nor ended with romanticism, and is not an apanage of romanticism.
Listened to the B. J. Thomas and I like it very much. I like American country and folk music.
Romanticism is much another thing, it is a tortured artistic movement, which likes the bizarre, the dyonisiac, and the radically subjective. The hippie-related music of the 60s is a rejuvenation of that.
Romantics like collage (or associations) so they will paste together folk art, with intellectual art, with experimentation, etc. etc. Very torturing, as I said. Just look at a painting of Picasso (“a particularly violent and misogynistic man, who spent his life crushing those less powerful and less privileged than himself.”[1]), and you will understand what I mean.
And it is very well in contradiction, in opposition to secular humanism as CFI defines it.
Unfortunately, it is seldom criticized. The only frontal and popular critics I know, and he is a self-identified humanist, is Alain de Botton. But De Botton is an existentialist, so… not compatible with my understanding of humanism.
[1] Vénus s’épilait-elle la chatte? # Picasso, séparer l’homme de l’artiste, Slate audio