Yacht Rock Revisted: What Yacht Rock is—and isn't.

Yes, that's a great one as well. One aspect that makes this album smoother than usual is the appearance of a string section on most tracks. The next Isley Brothers LP, The Real Deal, had another Smooth track called "It's Alright With Me."

 

Isley Jasper Isley's "Caravan of Love" is neither yacht nor rock, but it sure is some smooth soul (quiet storm?) and I've always loved it.

 

I remember that The Real Deal didn't sell at all, the group was splintered in two but they still had great songs. While it's not yacht rock, 1985's Masterpiece used a lot of players who were big names in yacht rock etc in the genre, it's overproduced but it has interesting remnants of the West Coast sound.

Yep, that's quiet storm and commercial R&B too.

 

I like this one, Chris is good at songs like this...

 

This is:

 

Yeah, he's yet another Christian artist who makes really legit yacht rock. He's got quite a few good tracks. I'll put him on the ark!

 

And he's certainly got the right name for CCM. Like a secular smoothy calling himself Yachty Yachtsman.

 

I think some of the latter-day CHIC albums fall into this trap; too smooth for disco, but too R&B for the pop charts. Here's one I like, "Sharing Love," from CHIC's 1982 Tongue in Chic album. Not much to it, but it has cool changes and a great smooth groove:

 

That video is gold—I'm so wearing that to work tomorrow.

 

I'm kind of on the fence with these guys. On the one hand, they've the West Coast smooth down. On the other though, they skew a bit early in their sound; they seem to favor the early to mid-'70s Mellow Gold a-la "Summer Breeze" more than the later yacht. They have certain elements of yacht, but their overall sound isn't quite right to me.

 

Have The Norwegian Fords been mentioned yet? Nu-Yacht Rock, similar to State Cows.

 

IMHO, this one is the best station. Really great station that either played more deep cuts from an artist that made me love their work (Karla Bonoff) or introduced me to artists I'd never heard of and now love their stuff (Ned Doheny, Terence Boylan, Iain Matthews, and particularly, especially Jimmie Spheeris).

I always thought of yacht rock having a bit of an R&B or jazz element to it, perhaps because of the blue-eyed soul of Michael McDonald and the jazz influences you can hear in Steely Dan.

I've always wondered how much the rise of popular soul and disco in the mid-70s influenced those bands?

This music certainly isn't disco, but I wonder if there's an influence in the same way that disco, filtered through different interpretations, influenced new wave. Mostly it's the chord changes and, as LeftCoastGator says above, "surprises" that kind of make me wonder how much of an influence there was and where it was all coming from.

 

Yeah, they've come up a few times in this thread—quiet a few fans here!

 

Are you saying it's "false yacht rock?"

 

Nealson-Pearson.
Logins-Messina.
Larsen-Feiten.
Captain-Tennille.

All hyphens to the dock, your boat is ready.

 

Ha! "Let each note I now play be a black arrow of death sent straight to the hearts of all those who would play false yacht rock!"

No, it's not that at all, primarily because—as far as I know—YGSF never set out to be a yacht rock band or claimed that they are. My issue, if you want to call it that, is that many people hear them and immediately declare them to be a yacht rock band. But if you listen to their output track by track, they really aren't. IMO, they basically threw many elements of the Westcoast sound into a blender and came up with their own sound.

 

So in the Can't See the Forest for the Trees Dept., I've gotten so into drilling down to the depths of obscurity looking for forgotten yacht rock that I failed to ask myself a basic question: Do I have all the tracks from the major players?

This is when I realized I'd forgotten something stunningly obvious: The two most recent Steely Dan albums. Forget about finding the best tracks—I've never even listened to either album.

So my question to you, the yacht rock populous of this storied website, is which tracks from Steely Dan Part 2: Electric Boogaloo are yacht rock gold? Are all of them? Are any of them?

 

I liked this song way more than I had any right to. How the heck is this a new song?

 

And like so many of their songs, it's All The Things: It has Fleetwood Mac verses, Eagles harmonies, an almost CSN chorus, weird little bridges that recall Steely Dan and '70s radio pop, and to top it all of, a Jay Graydon ripoff guitar solo.

 

Here's an interesting one: It's yacht rock, ark rock, and Scandinavian:

 

That's a cool song, I've got those last three albums, they basically had no audience for them as a few R&B groups were still using their old sound. Strange no man's land the charts became 81-84 or so....

 

While it was soundly rejected by the Yacht Rock guys as yacht rock, this is one of the sickest smooth Westcoast soul grooves I've heard in ages. (Also sampled nicely by Camp-Lo in their killer old school hip-hop jam "Luchini.")

 

This recent Roddy Frame (aka Aztec Camera) track reminds me of some of the tracks from that Young Gun Silver Fox album. Very 70's soft/easy rock. Judging from the lyrics, tempo, and backing vocals, it seems to be a homage to the Fleetwood Mac West Coast sound circa Rumours.

 

This song has so many glorious elements to it... but the programmed drums nearly ruin it for me (at least they sound programmed to me). They take a drummer out live... shame they don't have him lay the drum tracks down in the studio as well.

 

He usually starts with a drum loop, but Shawn Lee records real drums on most of their tracks. I've seen some video of him making the recordings for the previous album.