Boat songs

Walden Green on yacht rock and embracing the smooth.

About a week and a half ago, I saw Roberto Carlos Lange, the artist better known as Helado Negro, perform in Philadelphia—and bring down the whole house. I was unprepared: This Is How You Smile is one of the best records of the past five years, sure, but in a beautifully lowkey kind of way, and the beep boop-y compositions on PHASOR, Lange’s newest, had yet to fully click with me.

Maybe it was the presence of a live drummer, which gave those songs weight and bounce, or Lange’s magnetic stage presence, which was heavy on the dad dance moves and all the sexier for it. Regardless, there we all were, dancing ourselves, singing along to the hooks from “Gemini and Leo” and “Running,” breaking into rapturous applause after every. single. song. And the whole time, I kept thinking: this sounds kind of like yacht rock.

“Yacht rock,” originally known as the “West Coast sound,” is typically imagined as a little bubble universe that existed between roughly 1975 and 1985. You have a gravitational body of album artists (Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers feat. Michael McDonald, early Hall and Oates), all of the one- and two-hit wonders orbiting around them (Robbie Dupree, Player, Looking Glass), and then bands that exist debatably on the perimeter. For example, you will find some people grouping later-era Fleetwood Mac as yacht rock, but I disagree vehemently with that, and what I say here goes!

Another way to think about the genre is via this list of 4 rules for a yacht rock playlist from The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, who became one of yacht rock’s preeminent evangelists during the 2010s:

1. Song has to feel like it could be played on a yacht

2. No soft 70s rock allowed (Bread, Air Supply, etc)

3. Every 3 to 3.5 songs needs to include Michael McDonald in some way

4. Anything after 1984 is prob too late

I’m with Bill, up until that fourth point. Yacht rock isn’t a relic of a different age; I think it’s still with us today. To find it, we just have to look for the artists who’ve embraced its credo of smoothness above all to create statements of striking emotional clarity.

A case study: Future Islands’ indie-famous 2014 Letterman performance of “Seasons (Waiting on You).” Note the beachy synthesizers, breezy tempo, nautical album cover for that year’s Singles, and of course, the band being literally called Future Islands. It’s frontman Samuel T. Herring, though, who keeps the people (millennials, mostly) coming back and gives the band their strongest spiritual tether to the yacht rock days of yore. 

Herring’s voice may be anything but smooth, but his growl and shirt-tugging cornballiness do the same thing as one of Michael McDonald’s signature seal noises. There’s not a drop of the arch detachment that defined even the most open-hearted ‘80s New Wave bands like New Order, to whom Future Islands were likened at the time.

In indie circles, yacht rock goes through cycles of coolness and uncoolness. The 2007 webseries “Yacht Rock” is classic old YouTube, and in 2011, Destroyer’s Dan Bejar reached new heights of critical praise by channeling kitschy ‘80s soft rock on Kaputt. That same year, Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe became the flagbearer for a nascent vaporwave movement with samples from, among others, the obscure late-’70s band Pages, making it sort of the post-modernism to Kaputt’s yacht rock modernism. But could one have christened “Seasons” as both yacht rock and the song of 2014? It appears not.

LET’S ROCK