We've talked about the songs and we've talked about the artists. Now let's talk about the albums. If a person wanted to build a killer Yacht Rock collection on vinyl, what records do they absolutely need to have? I kept this one simple. I averaged the Yachtski scores of all the songs of the album that had been rated. The albums with the highest scores made the list. Well, sort of. As with the Top 25 YR Songs list, I instituted a one-per-artist rule. Just so you know, that means you should also seek out Steely Dan's Gaucho (1980), Al Jarreau's Breakin' Away (1981), Christopher Cross's Another Page (1983), the Doobie Brothers's One Step Closer (1980), and Robbie Dupree's Street Corner Heroes (1981). That would round you out to a nice Top 25. 20. Bill Champlin : Runaway (1981) Yachtski Average : 59.56 YR Tunes : 6 (" Runaway ", "Take It Uptown", "One Way Ticket", "Satisfaction", "Without You", ...
It was more complicated than I expected to determine the Top Yacht Rock artists. My first thought was to simply average the Yachtski score all of a particular artist's songs and choose the top 10, 15, 20, whatever. But then I realized this method didn't factor in the number of songs by an artist had that had been classified as Nyacht Rock. It also didn't account for an artist's contributions to other artists' songs. So I devised a system to account for that, as well as total number of YR songs and essentials. Like the Yachtski Scale, it provides a score out of 100. If an artist is above 50 they are classified as Yacht Rock. The higher they are above 50, the more YR they are. That's how I ended up with 16 artists, instead of the more traditional multiple of 5. (If I had rounded up to 20, the remaining four would have been Nielsen/Pearson, Ray Parker, Jr., Robbie Dupree, and Bobby Caldwell, but all fell just below the 50% threshold). * Something that strikes me as...