What Is Yacht Rock? Plus 20 Songs for Smooth Sailing on Rocky Waters

If you remove the bits about sailing in the chorus to Christopher Cross’s 1979 hit single . . . um, “Sailing” . . . this otherwise anthem of smooth becomes somewhat more desperate:

Considered a platonic ideal of the genre now known as “yacht rock,” “Sailing” seems to embody the kind of calm escapism that critics of the style have focused on. The perfectionist production quality, lush harmonies, and reliance on lyrical sentimentality have made the song—and many of the entries in the subgenre in general—appear unserious and ripe for parody. In fact, the term is itself a joke, coined in 2005 by an LA-based comedy group led by J. D. Ryznar. The group created a web series called Yacht Rock featuring fictionalized accounts of many of the genre's key players.

Yacht Rock's Epic Voyage

But it’s far from this simple. Yacht rock has weathered shifts in critical and public opinions in the roughly 45 years since it first emerged, and has been cited as hugely influential to contemporary musicians such as Questlove (of the Roots) and bass wunderkind Thundercat. Touring acts paying homage to the genre have become wildly successful, from the soft-metal group Yächtley Crëw to Yacht Rock Revue, which features Berklee alum Mark Dannells '89 on guitar and vocals.

This history is explored at length in the new HBO documentary Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, directed by Garret Price (Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage). On the genre’s origins, Price explains in Variety, “It’s rooted in R&B and soul and funk and jazz and Black music, basically,” which calls out the paradox of how appropriation and true appreciation combined to create a new expression. Regionality also played an important role in creating the scene, as “it all took place in Southern California, within this ecosystem of studios with the session guys,” Price says.

Watch the trailer for HBO's Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary:

Smooth, but Make It Complex

The style in its heyday was often referred to simply as “the West Coast sound,” which is how it was introduced to Maureen McMullan PD '09, senior concert producer at Berklee and yacht rock aficionado. McMullan was drawn to the music’s keen sense of musical and harmonic complexity while still sounding like effortless pop. That complexity is due in large part to the significant influence of R&B and jazz. As McMullan explains, “Broadly speaking, while we are more accustomed to hearing triadic chords and the occasional dominant 7th in standard pop tunes, yacht rock introduces jazz-inspired harmonies, including extended tensions (7th, 9ths, #11s, etc.), non-diatonic slash chords, and advanced writing devices such as modal interchange (where chords are “borrowed” from parallel scales or modes).”

A notable example, she says, is the song “Peg” by Steely Dan, which appears on their masterpiece album Aja. The song “places a strong emphasis on technique, precision, and nuance in both the musical performances and production, all while maintaining an unwavering sense of groove, feel, and pocket,” McMullan says. “For me, this perfect balance between artistry and accessibility is what makes songs in this genre so magnetic and satisfying.”

It's worth noting that Steely Dan has always had a somewhat complicated relationship with being pinned down to any one genre, especially after the term “yacht rock” brought a level of kitsch and parody into the discussion. And yet, the band is spoken about in nearly religious terms for yacht rock fans. When Berklee alum and cofounding band member Donald Fagen '66 '01H was asked by Garrett Price to be in the HBO documentary, he had some . . . choice words for the director before promptly hanging up. At the same time, the band licensed a number of Steely Dan songs for inclusion in the film, so perhaps there is at least a quiet, winking acceptance of their place in the nautico-musical canon.

The New Wrecking Crew

Steely Dan is just one of the top-tier artists that are considered torch-bearers of yacht rock. Kenny Loggins, the Doobie Brothers, Toto, and the aforementioned Christopher Cross have all cemented their place on Yacht Rushmore. If you look at the personnel involved in making the music for these various artists, you start to notice a lot of the same names—chief among them Michael McDonald, Steve Lukather, David Paich, and the Porcaro brothers, Jeff, Steve, and Mike. And lest there’s a temptation to pigeonhole these musicians as rank-and-file yacht-rockers, you need only look at the credits on Michael Jackson’s Thriller—the best-selling album of all-time—to see the unimpeachable impact these players have had on music history. In many ways, they were the next generation of the Wrecking Crew—the famous group of studio musician titans who appeared on countless seminal albums in the '60s and early '70s. 

Taken by the Fantasy

The line that follows the chorus in Cross’s “Sailing,” “Fantasy / It gets the best of me,” may be the style’s perfect slogan for a number of reasons. It plays, of course, on the simple cultural understanding of a fantasy—a happy place that exists only in our imagination, and yet something many people try to “get lost” in. Take the following YouTube comment on the song: “For 4 minutes you could be somewhere else . . . ” If reality were everything we wanted it to be, we wouldn’t be looking to be anywhere else, even if just for a few minutes.

So to push on that idea of a fantasy a little further: The need for a fantasy emerges out of a reality that is on some level, difficult to inhabit. But an escape doesn’t have to be escapism, particularly if it’s created to be temporary. (And even if you want to get literal and say that yacht rock’s endgame is to live forever at sea, even a houseboat has to dock eventually). Plus, Cross confesses that, until he sets sail, freedom is just something he’s heard about. To experience liberation, even if just for a few minutes, means that you return to reality and all its complications with renewed energy.

The difference with yacht rock is that it never actually returns to reality. While artists like Joni Mitchell remind us that paradise may soon be a parking lot, yacht rock's humming on a radio in that parking lot like a transmission from that lost paradise.

Yacht Rock: A Sorta-Essential Playlist

The debate over which songs or artists can be considered yacht rock has turned into its own pastime. The creators behind the 2005 Yacht Rock web series went so far as to rank hundreds of songs on a podcast and list they call Yacht or Nyacht, which includes what they believe are the genre's essentials, why Hall & Oates and the Eagles are decidedly not yacht rock, and why "Catalina Breeze," by the Blue Jean Committee, a fictional band led by Fred Armisen and Bill Hader, is. This all to say: the following list shouldn't be seen as definitive, so if you don't agree with the choices, there has to be a Reddit thread out there for you to air your grievances.