Female musicians no longer second-class passengers on the yacht rock revival

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Memory rush over me, now I step into the sun – Steely Dan

In a wave that few saw coming, female indie rockers are now boarding the boat called yacht rock, a soft and sophisticated genre from the late 1970s and early ‘80s typically made by affluent men and often maligned as kitschy and dorky. Steely Dan is being rediscovered, Michael McDonald is hip for the first time and a bygone era of the recording industry is receiving new appreciation.

“It’s the music of excellence,” says Meg Remy, who makes music under the moniker U.S. Girls. The first track on her latest album, Bless This Mess, is the yacht-ready Only Daedalus.

Yacht rock, for the uninitiated, refers to slick, meticulous, melodic rock characterized by the sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano and the lyrical inspirations of Africa, Rosanna Arquette and the things that fools believe.

Why “yacht” rock? Because yachts represent a certain lifestyle (extravagant) and locale (high-rent Los Angeles, where the albums were often made) that are unattainable to mere mortals.

Why is yacht rock sailing again, particularly among indie musicians? Because the processes and circumstances that produced the music are of a glorious audiophile era that can only be dreamed about today. It is neither nostalgia nor irony that results in new yacht rock music, but an appreciation for the pursuit of perfection.

“We simply don’t have that luxury this generation of experiencing that,” Remy says.

Today’s artists are not selling albums in anywhere near the numbers they once did. Recording budgets are slashed, and digital technology drastically reduces time and cost. Indie artists inspired by yacht rock today are pining for a lost era when precious music was made laboriously.

“It’s the sound of people given lots of time and money to fret over a sound in a way that you just can’t anymore,” says Alex Pappademas, author of the wry new deep dive Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. “The economics of the record industry doesn’t work that way and hasn’t in a long time.”

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Younger artists embracing yacht rock can be traced back to 2017, when progressive R&B bassist Thundercat collaborated with McDonald and Kenny Loggins on the bubbly groove of the single Show You the Way. British Columbian indie-rocker Mac DeMarco released the decidedly yachty album This Old Dog the same year.

In 2018, Greg Prato’s The Yacht Rock Book was published. Podcasts and playlists related to the genre have flourished, and Sirius XM satellite radio has a station dedicated to the smooth gloss of Christopher Cross and his kind.

Recent music from women including Remy and Emm Gryner marks a new chapter in the resurgence of a genre dominated by dudes. “The term yacht rock mostly brings up negative things for me, like white, male, money and power,” Remy says. “It makes me think of dads who cared more about their stereos than their children.”

Remy is specifically enthused with Steely Dan, the yacht rock flagship currently enjoying a revival – a “Steely Danaissance,” Pappademas writes in his book – of its own. She sees the lyrics of the Dan’s Donald Fagen as still state of the art: “He’s a close second to Bob Dylan when it comes to imagery and setting a scene. It’s something to strive for.”

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And in an age today in which laptop auteurs make no-fuss records in their bedrooms, the Dan’s one-more-take diligence and strive for flawlessness stand out. “They achieved something,” Remy says, “that lay people never could.”

Way back in ‘77, Steely Dan dropped Aja, a sonic masterpiece and the pioneer voyage of the style we now recognize as yacht rock. Three years later, the group (ostensibly Fagen and Walter Becker) released Gaucho, easily one of the most expensive albums ever made and a pinnacle in yacht.

Fagen and the late Becker were obsessive craftsmen working in an analogue era in which recording budgets were as sky-high as the people who made the music. In a bid to capture grace, warmth and magnificence on magnetic tape, the whims of precisionists were indulged: Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler was hired for hours of work on Gaucho, but only 40 seconds of his efforts were ultimately used. Fagen and Becker even commissioned the invention of a US$150,000 drum-sampling machine.

“They had the greatest session drummers ever, but they wanted something slightly more perfect,” Pappademas says.

Some later sneered at the quest for the pristine. As Pappademas points out in his book, Steely Dan came to represent “an affront to the values that indie rock had inherited from punk – a genre often romanticized as having emerged as a necessary corrective to slick mainstream 1970s and ‘80s music made in expensive studios by self-regarding cocaine addicts.”

Gryner understands the snobbish attitude. “I’m as much to blame as anyone,” says the Canadian singer-songwriter, who released her debut album, And Distrust It, independently in 1995. “I championed the lo-fi aesthetic, but eventually who you are has to come out.”

Her new album, Business & Pleasure, was made with the purest of yacht intentions. She tried to pitch a song to Michael McDonald (of Doobie Brothers fame) through producer Fred Mollin. Instead, she ended up making an album with Mollin, whose credits appear on records by Jimmy Webb, Dan Hill, America, Johnny Mathis and others.

Some of the Business & Pleasure’s lyrics (written by Gryner’s partner, the poet Michael Holmes) are tongue in cheek. The song Jack was inspired by General Hospital’s Jack Wagner’s keening ballad All I Need from 1984 and the actor-singer’s love of golf. A bonkers interview Fagen gave during the pandemic motivated lead track, Loose Wig.

But the music is serious. Gryner decided to make Business & Pleasure when she realized the heavy musicians of the yachting era were dying off and taking their magic tricks with them. On the sessions were drummer Shannon Forrest, keyboardist Pat Coil and guitarist Pat Buchanan, who have toured with Toto, McDonald and Hall & Oates, respectively. One does not hire studio cats of that level for an exercise in irony.

“This isn’t indie cool,” Gryner says. “It’s showing our musical expertise and not being ashamed of it.”

The Steely Dan album Can’t Buy a Thrill turned 50 last year, and even in 1972 Fagen was already in a wistful state of mind. You can hear it on Midnite Cruiser – “The time of our time has come and gone / I fear we’ve been waiting too long” – and on Reelin’ in the Years: “Your everlasting summer and you can see it fading fast, so you grab a piece of something that you think is gonna last.”

Gryner sees no end to the allure of yacht rock and the Dan. “It’s going to live on,” she says, mentioning that her recording engineer has a Steely Dan cover band. “No matter what age you are, there’s something about the music that lets you get inside it.”