Skip to main content

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 16 Yacht Rock Artists

Top 20 Yacht Rock Albums

Yacht Rock Dabblers

The Most Yacht Rock Year

Top 18 Modern Yacht Rock Songs

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Unlikely Musical Life of Tom Kelly

You may not know the name Tom Kelly, but I guarantee that you've sung along to songs he wrote.  Born in West Lafayette, Indiana in 1952, Tom moved to Effingham, Illinois when he was 11 years old, just in time to witness the Beatles' debut on Ed Sullivan. Bit by the rock music bug, he joined a local band called the Trifaris, singing and playing bass. His family moved back to Indiana in '66. When Tom finished high school, he decided to go to college in Illinois, but his choice was made based on extracurricular factors, not academic ones. "I started at Eastern [Illinois University] because there was a band,” he told the Effingham Daily News in 2011, “Then I transferred to Southern [Illinois University] because there was another band.”  Champaign, Illinois  Continuing his college hopping, Tom headed closer to home to attend Purdue, and there he had a group called The Gaping Huggers, comprised of former fellow Trifari JC Marshall on drums, and University of Illino...
Post a Comment
Read more

12 More by Collective Soul

  Sometimes an artist just needs 12  more  songs to summarize their career. Case in point... Collective Soul released a pretty decent best of compilation - 7even Year Itch: 1994-2001 - nearly a quarter of a century ago, but there's been nothing to summarize their output since then. Considering that output consists of seven albums and a couple of EPs, we've got our work cut out for us. (Since the band stopped having "hits" in 2009, most of these are just my personal preference, though I did give the singles first consideration). 1. "Better Now" (from Youth , 2004) "Better Now" is buzzy burst of optimism that has stood the test of time/\. 2. "There's a Way" (from Youth , 2004) Great riff, great chorus, great bridge, great song. 3. "What Can I Give You" (from Afterwords , 2007) Fascinating structure on this one: It starts out somewhat pedestrian, then goes into a soaring chorus followed by an even more melodic post-chorus, the...
Post a Comment
Read more

86. The Magic Numbers - The Magic Numbers (2005)

Very few things in life can sustain the same level of excitement from beginning to end, and The Magic Numbers' debut album is no exception. Like a party that's loud, full and hoppin' from the get-go and then eventually dwindles down to a quiet few, the CD makes its statement early and then fades away. Mornings Eleven is a helluva opener. It consists of two separate sections; the first makes you want to shake your ass, the second makes you want to swoon. Going from country-rock boogie to '50s doo-wop harmony, the two movements spend the song alternating back and forth, and it's effective enough to make the 5-and-a-half minute running time seem too short. As the album continues that becomes a recurring theme. The songs are long, but rarely overstay their welcome. That's a tribute to Romeo Stodart's compositions, but another factor may be that the group consists of two sets of brothers and sisters (the Allman Brothers would be proud). I believe that familial s...
12 comments
Read more