‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
“Yacht rock” is a genre kinda like emo: No musician admits to making this style of music. Unlike emo, though (maybe more like “indie sleaze”), no one called it “yacht rock” at the time. Nevertheless, whether artists like the name or not, yacht rock exists now. It used to be considered something of a guilty pleasure, but these days, after a splashy (no pun intended) documentary about it got a lot of attention, it’s just a regular pleasure. Questlove loves yacht rock! So do Thundercat, Mac Demarco, Vampire Weekend, and many other musicians considered far “cooler” than Toto ever was. So, today, we salute the yacht rock catalog through covers.
This brings up a contentious question though: What counts as yacht rock? We didn’t want to get derailed debating that indefinitely, so we deferred to the experts. The guys who coined the term in a 2000s web series have a long-running website and podcasts called Yacht or Nyacht. They literally invented the phrase, so we followed their guidance. Any song that scored above 50 on their 100-point scale—more yacht than nyacht—counted. Any song that scored below did not. (You can read more about their criteria on their website, but one thing to note is they define yacht rock not just by the sound of a song, but also whether it emerged from that specific ’70s-LA studio-rat scene.)
Their rigorous ranking includes most of the songs you’d expect, by The Doobie Brothers (and McDonald solo), Christopher Cross, Toto, etc. It also helps deal with the thorny cases. Steely Dan is mostly not yacht-rock, but some songs, particularly in the Aja era, very much are. Fleetwood Mac, though, is definitively not yacht-rock. (Good news: We have an entire Fleetwood Mac list you can peruse.)
So, if you have any beef with what songs do or don’t count, take it up with them. We just want to celebrate the music. Sail away on these 30 covers that do just that.
Thanks for this, but 3 minor quibbles: the original version of Love Will Keep Us Together was by Neil Sedaka, the original version of What a Fool Believes was by Kenny Loggins, and, most egregiously, you posted a photo of Loggins and Messina, along with Christopher Cross the ultimate yacht rock kings, but no Loggins and Messina songs (What a Fool Believes doesn’t count)! What, no Angry Eyes by the Pointer Sisters? And, since their versions of House at Pooh Corner and Danny’s Song were themselves covers (even though Kenny Loggins wrote them both) you might have chosen to use their versions, though Mary Travers did sing the former and Neko Case (!) and Me First & The Gimme Gimmes (!!) sang the latter. Still, great fun. Thanks.
Mmm, Joe, re LWKUT, whilst it was, of course, a Sedaka song first, no way could it have been deemed yacht, whereas the later C&T hit epitomised the genre, right down to the peaked hat worn by Daryl Dragon. Plus, I forgot to remember to nail my Cover credentials around the O Carol hitmaker, straining to meet my overshot deadline for inclusion. I can’t speak for the mighty Kenny and Jim, but it is good to see egregiously in your response.