
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
07/05/2026
Alysa Liu and Shohei Ohtani Help Drive Viewership as 91 of the Top 100 Broadcast...
07/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/05/2026
Cobalt Digital Wins Two Future Best of Show Awards at 2026 NAB Show
Manufacturer Recognized by TV Tech and TVBEurope for Innovation in signal processing
Cobal...
07/05/2026
Software and hardware platforms, AI power and user-friendliness on show...
07/05/2026
Intinor will demonstrate its latest technical enhancements for the Direkt series at BroadcastAsia 2026. With a continued focus on reliable contribution and remo...
07/05/2026
Bitmovin has announced that MUBI has chosen Bitmovin as its cloud VOD encoding partner, replacing MUBI's legacy on premises encoding setup to improve scalab...
07/05/2026
Meet Graduates from Berklees Class of 2026 Members of this years graduating class reflect on their proudest moments at Berklee and look ahead to whats next.
...
07/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/05/2026
At BroadcastAsia 2026, Interra Systems will demonstrate its latest innovations in automated quality control (QC), real-time monitoring, and captioning. The comp...
07/05/2026
At this year's Broadcast Asia, PlayBox Neo is set to unveil recent innovations across its PlayBox Neo Suite and integrated range of broadcast media solution...
07/05/2026
Strategic three-year partnership marks delivery phase of BFBS' next-generation media vision
Media organisation and military charity BFBS (British Forces Br...
07/05/2026
Amagi, the agentic industry cloud platform for unified broadcast, streaming, and monetization, today announced the availability of its In-Content Ads offering v...
07/05/2026
Lightware Visual Engineering has developed Rack Taurus for rack-based environments such as education and corporate training spaces. It enables clean and simple ...
07/05/2026
Jigsaw24, the UK's leading media equipment supplier and systems integrator, will showcase its expanded end-to-end workflow capabilities at MPTS 2026, signal...
07/05/2026
Ease Live, an Evertz company, today announced that it has been granted a US Patent for its proprietary graphical overlay technology, the foundation for interact...
07/05/2026
Test & measurement innovator Leader Electronics of Europe will present an extensive range of Leader, PHABRIX and LeaderPhabrix test and measurement solutions at...
07/05/2026
At Broadcast Asia 2026 (Stand 5H3 8), LiveU is redefining live production with its most powerful IP-video EcoSystem to date built to help broadcasters and con...
07/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/05/2026
Recreating the 1974 Doctor Who Time Tunnel in After Effects
Graham Quince May 6, 2026
0 Comments
The Time Tunnel from Doctor Who titles is one of th...
07/05/2026
Less typing, more tanking.
Faster logins mean more time in the gaming action - and this week provides GeForce NOW members with a smoother path straight into th...
06/05/2026
Gravity Media Chief RF Communications Engineer Glenn Willems uses Wisycom RF over Fiber and wireless solutions across major cycling events and international mar...
06/05/2026
A Sennheiser Spectera module is now available in Bitfocus Companion and Buttons, enabling direct integration of Spectera with the two software platforms. The mo...
06/05/2026
Ted Turner, the visionary media entrepreneur whose appetite for disruption helpe...
06/05/2026
Peacock is going all-in on the beautiful game - streaming all 104 FIFA World Cup...
06/05/2026
Polands Miecznik-class frigates are part of the largest contract in Polish shipbuilding history. (Image Credit: PGZ Stocznia Wojenna)...
06/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/05/2026
Riedel Communications today announced the expansion of its leadership structure as part of a strategic initiative to strengthen both its operational management ...
06/05/2026
For nearly three decades, Veteran Production Sound Mixer and Five-time Emmy Award Winner Dirk Sciarrotta has helped define the sonic identity of the long-runnin...
06/05/2026
ZEISS CinCraft LensCore: Cinema Lens Looks for Compositing
Brie Clayton May 6, 2026
0 Comments
ZEISS announces the launch of CinCraft LensCore, a nove...
06/05/2026
Wisycom Solves Extreme RF Challenges Across Miles of Live Action for Gravity Med...
06/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/05/2026
Narrative Entertainment has partnered with Encompass to deliver high-quality subtitling of its Great! network content using the Altitude Intelligence AI assiste...
06/05/2026
SipRadius, widely recognized for making content processing and connectivity secure and seamless, is proud to launch a dramatic new approach to AI content creati...
06/05/2026
When the broadband and media industry gathers at ANGA COM in Cologne from May 19 to 21, Big Blue Marble will be at the forefront. The international broadcast an...
06/05/2026
Cinegy GmbH, a leading developer of software-defined television technology, is proud to exhibit at MPTS for the first time. Visitors to the stand will discover ...
06/05/2026
Val Jeanty Receives 2026 Doris Duke Artist Award Jeanty, a composer, percussionist, and turntablist, is the fourth Berklee recipient of the prestigious award ...
06/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/05/2026
When live cycling races and international marathons stretch for miles across cities and countryside, there is no margin for RF failure in live broadcast. As Chi...
06/05/2026
Oberkochen/Germany, May 5, 2026
ZEISS announces the launch of CinCraft LensCore, a novel solution for creating physically based cinematic lens looks for visual...
06/05/2026
The race to build the world's most powerful AI factories demands networking ...
06/05/2026
How changes to proteins can alter drug interactions for new precision therapies Scripps Research team maps how chemical modifications to proteins affect drug bi...
05/05/2026
Three phones were hardwired for power and transmission to the truck; camera feat...
05/05/2026
The creative studio behind campaigns for the NBA, Fanatics Sportsbook & Casino, ...
05/05/2026
Nielsen has announced results from a co-viewing pilot program covering February&...