
Yacht Rock: Smooth Sailing on Rocky Waters Read about how the soft-rock genre has weathered the test of time, and listen to a playlist of some of the best yacht rock songs, from Christopher Cross and Toto to Steely Dan and Thundercat.
By
Bryan Parys
December 9, 2024
Michael McDonald, one of yacht rocks icons.
Image by Soul Train/Getty/Courtesy HBO
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:
Takes me away to where Ive always heard it could be
Just a dream and the wind to carry me
Soon I will be free
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 genres key players.
Yacht Rocks Epic VoyageBut 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 Y chtley Cr w 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 HBOs Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary:
Smooth, but Make It ComplexThe 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.
Its 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 CrewSteely 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 FantasyThe 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
North America Stories
17/12/2025
Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame Inducts 10 Industry Icons During Unforgettable ...
17/12/2025
ESPN to Debut MNF Playbook with Next Gen Stats, a New AI-Driven NFL Data-AltCastThe series, powered by Adrenaline TruPlay AI, launches Dec. 22 and runs through ...
17/12/2025
Inaugural Optum Golf Channel Games Debut Under the Lights' in Primetime on ...
17/12/2025
Audiences Watched Over 103 Billion Minutes of TV on Thanksgiving Day
NFL Games ...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
KPop Demon Hunters Stars Visit Berklee for Weeklong Celebration Andrew Choi and EJAE, who voiced the film's main characters and contributed to its soundtr...
17/12/2025
Back to All News
Inside The Unseen World Of Indian Customs: Netflix Reveals The...
17/12/2025
Back to All News
Netflix announces PAPARAZZI KING: the docu series coming to Ne...
17/12/2025
Back to All News
Netflix Unveils First Look at Jo Nesbo's Detective Hole Pr...
17/12/2025
Back to All News
Netflix Welcomes Warner Bros. Discovery Board Recommendation
Business
17 December 2025
Global
Link copied to clipboard
After Careful Revi...
17/12/2025
The Hao AI Lab research team at the University of California San Diego - at the forefront of pioneering AI model innovation - recently received an NVIDIA DGX B...
17/12/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
16/12/2025
Three 12-kilowatt Advanced Electric Propulsion System thrusters, supplied by L3Harris Technologies, form the core of Gateway's propulsion system. Pictured i...
16/12/2025
The challenge facing America's defense industrial base is not just about speed - its about rebuilding the foundation that makes speed possible. Our nations ...
16/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
16/12/2025
SEVILLE, Spain Canal Sur, the public broadcasting service for Andalusia, Spain, has completed a total technology refresh based on Pebble's resilient, softwa...
16/12/2025
NEW YORK Teleprompting hardware provider Telescript International has acquired all software code and intellectual property previously owned by Telescript West. ...
16/12/2025
As cable operators face increased competition from 5G fixed wireless access providers, a new report from Ookla Research finds that T-Mobile is the FWA speed lea...
16/12/2025
Apple has announced a major upgrade to the Apple TV app for device owners outside the Apple ecosystem with news that the Apple TV app for Android now supports G...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Emma Appleton, Fares Fares, Frida Gustavsson and Jakob Oftebro...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Docu-reality My Korean Boyfriend Gets a Trailer and Premiere D...
15/12/2025
Harlem Globetrotters Celebrate 100th Anniversary With New Brand Campaign From Th...
15/12/2025
Top L-R: La Tierra Del Valor (The Home of the Brave), Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawe...
15/12/2025
L3Harris will leverage 15 years of experience supporting the E-4B Nightwatch and...
15/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the loss of federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and operational changes, the statewide pub...
15/12/2025
BOULDER, Colo. Public Media Venture Group (PMVG), Venture Technologies Group (VTG), and WQED have completed a multipart agreement that they say will significant...
15/12/2025
How Rivian s Design Puts Drivers First-And Why That Matters Published on Dec 15, 2025 Categories: Business Solutions
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Sha...
15/12/2025
NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD - the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) ...
15/12/2025
Modern workflows showcase the endless possibilities of generative and agentic AI on PCs.
Of many, some examples include tuning a chatbot to handle product-supp...
13/12/2025
Powering Client Growth: Horizon Deepens Nielsen Partnership, Enabling More Effic...
13/12/2025
In a move that will help it offer more flexible and less costly programming options, YouTube TV has announced that it will be launching YouTube TV Plans with mo...
13/12/2025
SINGAPORE Magna Systems has designed, built and completed what is believed to be the first full UHD and IP-based OB truck in Southeast Asia for a Singapore medi...
12/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Everything You Need to Know for Next Week's Big Sho...
12/12/2025
Hailey Gates at the Atropia premiere (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)...
12/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the elimination of Federal federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and changes in the way they...
12/12/2025
Wisycom and DPA Microphones announce the appointment of Ren Moerch as Group Product Director, Wireless, a strategic leadership role that will guide the combine...
12/12/2025
SMPTE , the home of media professionals, technologists, and engineers, in conjuncture with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the Entertainment Technolog...
12/12/2025
Keepit, the vendor-independent, cloud-native data protection provider, today announced a strategic go-to-market relationship in Poland with Ingram Micro, a lead...
12/12/2025
Atomos announced the immediate availability of a new firmware update for its Ninja TX GO and Ninja TX monitor-recorders, unlocking Open Gate 48P RAW recording w...
12/12/2025
Professional Wireless Systems (PWS) once again played a critical role in delivering flawless wireless coordination and support at the 2025 Latin Grammy Awards a...