Donny Osmond Archives

The 30 Best Yacht Rock Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 2 Responses »

May 302025

‘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.

Full Albums: Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Retrospective’

Posted by Seuras Og at 1:00 pm 4 Responses »

Jan 072022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Retrospective saw Buffalo Springfield’s record company out to catch a final buck or two, their cash cow having imploded ahead of quite how much of a cash cow it could or should have been. The band had been on the decidedly no-frills ATCO label, an offshoot of Atlantic for acts that failed to fit their then template of blues, jazz, r’n’b and soul, along with other square pegs of the day, like Dr. John. I say no frills, as their cover art was always of the decidedly cheap and shoddy nature: Retrospective has a cover that cannot have taxed too many creative brains, the “rips” in the background paper, to allow inserts and a makeshift collage, are all clearly visible.

Retrospective, which is actually subtitled “The Best of Buffalo Springfield,” actually performed as well as their final album, Last Time Around, and surpassed the sales of both Buffalo Springfield and Buffalo Springfield Again. It’s an artistic success, too; it contains many songs which have a greater quality, with the hindsight of time, than perhaps was fully appreciated at the time. Stills’ “For What It’s Worth,” their biggest hit, has repaid itself time after time after time, becoming a soundtrack shorthand for setting a time and place during the US civil rights years. That has to appease him a little, surely, against his always apparent second pegging against his Canadian nemesis.

Covering the Hits: “Ben” (Michael Jackson)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 2:00 pm 1 Response »

Oct 262018

“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty years.

It says something about Michael Jackson, and I’m not sure what, that his first solo number-one record being a love song to a rat is one of the less strange things about him. Just fourteen years old, Michael was recording solo work at the behest of Motown Records, who wanted to have Jackson 5-related product to sell without necessarily having all five Jacksons. Meanwhile, a movie was coming out that featured young Lee Montgomery performing a sweet song, but the producers wanted a bigger name to rerecord the song for the movie’s theme, and Donny Osmond, the original choice, was on tour with his brothers. That’s how “Ben,” the title track to the sequel to Willard, found its way into Jackson’s hands and onto the airwaves in 1972.

Ben was the tale of an ailing young boy who befriended a rat colony that had been trained to kill in the previous film, led by the dashing young varmint Ben. The critics weren’t kind – Roger Ebert called it “a geek movie” back in the day when that couldn’t be anything but an insult – but the theme song, a gentle oasis amidst the horror that surrounded it, caught the public’s fancy, and they flocked to it like a rat to cheese. “Ben” wound up selling 1.7 million copies in the US alone.
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