PLAYLIST

Yacht Rock for Smooth Sailors

Content warning: some of these songs are incredibly smooooth

This may not be a yacht, but it’s a boat and I captained it. And that rocked. Image from author’s private collection.

In the mid-2010s, I overheard some teenagers listening to Toto.

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, they’ve probably discovered yacht rock,” my friend told me.

Yacht rock?

My friend explained there’s a sub-branch of late 70s and early 80s soft rock so breezy and smooth that, decades later, it became recognised as its own genre.

What a fool I’d been to have never known about yacht rock!

Yacht rock songs can be hard to pin down. Coiners of the term — JD Ryznar, Hunter Stair, Dave Lyons and “Hollywood” Steve Huey — had a podcast called Yacht or Nyacht where they carefully classified the genre based on their yachtski scale. From what I can gather, the characteristics of a seaworthy yacht rock tune include the following:

• Anything to do with sailing or southern California, preferably both
• Anything to do with one or more Doobie Brothers
• Bright, light and breezy
• Electric piano
• Influenced by jazz and R&B
• Melody over beat
• Not disco, hard rock, punk or…