All aboard: New documentary charts the rise, fall and rise again of yacht rock

You may not have noticed but yacht rock has been having a quite a revival over this past decade. Now after the successful Too Slow To Disco compilation series and Katie Puckrik’s 2018 BBC documentary I Can Go For That: The Smooth World Of Yacht Rock, HBO has picked up on the phenomenon and announced a new documentary series.

For those still scratching their heads at the name, ‘yacht rock’ refers to the sort of music many veterans of the late 60s made in the 1970s and 80s as they (and their audience) grew older and more affluent, and in the US especially, FM radio began to dominate over AM.

Its practitioners included a lot of men with beards – key artists include Toto, Steely Dan, Michael McDonald and Christopher Cross. Taking influences from soul, jazz and R n’ B, yacht rock was smooth, sumptuously produced and the absolute antithesis of the punk, post punk and new romantic styles that dominated in the UK between those years.

And for decades it was the very epitome of uncool. But inevitably (along with the beards) it returned. The ‘guilty pleasures’ phenomenon of the 2000s undoubtedly helped in this. But there is a theory – which will no doubt be explored in the documentary – that just as yacht rock was easy, carefree and essentially escapist and so what people needed in the 1970s, thus it fulfils a similar role in our equally troubled era.

The HBO doc, punningly entitled Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary lands on November 29. It chronicles the rise of the genre in the 1970s and its unlikely comeback over the past decade, with additional profiles of key artists from the genre, such as McDonald, Steely Dan, Kenny Loggins and others.

In addition to those first generation yachtsmen, it also features interviews with those who have been influenced by the music, including De La Soul’s Prince Paul, Paramore and Vampire Weekend touring guitarist Brian Robert Jones, Thundercat, Questlove, Mac DeMarco, among other music producers, journalists, and critics.

It’s directed by Garret Price who was also behind the camera for Woodstock 99: Love, Peace and Rage and Daisy Jones and the Six. As you can see in the above trailer it’s left to the comedian and actor Fred Armisen to neatly sum up the enduring appeal of yacht rock. “The singers all seem to be saying, ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK’.” And don’t we all need that sometimes?