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A Beginner's Guide to Yacht Rock

We hadn't been dating long when I learned of my future wife's love of Kenny Loggins. It was late 2006 or early 2007, and the term "Yacht Rock" was just emerging into the popular consciousness. I bought her the 1982 album High Adventure at Cheapo Records, and we danced along to "Heart to Heart" and "This is It." Soon we began revisiting songs from our early childhood: "Sailing," "Reminiscing," "How Long?," "Baby, Come Back," and "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)."

About five years ago I began making a concerted effort to learn more about Yacht Rock (YR from here forward), and discovered the Yacht or Nyacht podcast and website, which was created by  the four guys who coined the term back in 2005 - J.D. Ryznar, Steve Huey, Hunter Stair, and David Lyons - in response to a growing misunderstanding over what constitutes YR and what doesn't. It seems that some people (even including seasoned music journalists and documentary filmmakers and cover bands) had missed the boat. By and large, the tendency was to overapply the label (Wendy and I were slightly guilty of the latter, as you'll see). Even the artists themselves seemed confused, as evidenced by a 2013 "Sail Rock" tour that featured Christopher Cross, Robbie Dupree, Player, Gary Wright, Al Stewart, Orleans, Firefall, and John Ford Coley, when only the first two on that list have true YR bonafides.

On one hand, the confusion is forgivable. YR is actually a microgenre, one of the only popular musical movements to be given its label retroactively. How can you define a style of music the musicians didn't even know they were making? Well, this is a case where, when a certain group of music fans looked back, they saw a pattern that hadn't been apparent in the moment. In its purest form YR is an extremely insular entity with very narrow parameters, sonically, temporally, aesthetically, and authorially. A person has to make a concerted effort to educate themselves on those parameters, and if they don't, well, we all know that if a misunderstanding becomes widespread, it's has a way of becoming truth (This is why the word "literally" now means both something that is empirically true and something that is not actually true).

Yacht or Nyacht fights the good fight by using the Yachtski Scale, which assigns a score (0-100) to particular songs based on the following criteria: 

  • High or "clean" production values
  • Jazz and R&B influences
  • Use of electric piano
  • An upbeat rhythm called the "Doobie Bounce"

In addition, the "pure" or "essential" examples of YR also meet these standards:

  • Use of specific studio musicians (members of Toto, Greg Phillinganes, Tom Scott, Richard Page) and writer/producers (Jay Graydon, David Foster, Michael Omartian, Rod Temperton)
  • Soulful lead vocals
  • Released between the years 1976 and 1983

Each of the four guys scores a song, and then those four scores are averaged into their final Yachtski rating. If the song scores 50 or higher, it's Yacht Rock. If it's less than that, it's Naycht Rock. They keep a running list that, when analyzed, provides quite a bit of clarity about what YR is, was, and could be.

Thus I have created what I'm calling "A Beginner's Guide to Yacht Rock." This series of posts will explore six different aspects of the YR phenomenon:

Top 25 Yacht Rock Songs

Top 20  Yacht Rock Artists

Top 30 Yacht Rock Albums

Top 40 Yacht Rock Dabblers

The Most Yacht Rock Year

Top 20 Modern Yacht Rock Songs

I hope you'll sail along with me on this journey!

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