Buy me a boat? That’s so 2015. This year, country music — or at least a few of its leading men — is moving up from fishing rigs and pontoons to the easy listening waters of yacht rock.
On Friday, Keith Urban released his 13th album, Flow State, a collection comprising mostly covers of classic songs like “Steal Away,” “Summer Breeze,” and “Just the Two of Us,” featuring Little Big Town, John Mayer, and lord of the smooth himself, Michael McDonald. It was also co-produced by Dann Huff, who played on some of the seminal yacht-rock records as a session musician in the Eighties. Urban has said that he started the project as an accidental antidote to the stress of our world, and sure, we get that: Who hasn’t calmed their post-breakup heart in heavily divisive times with a little Doobie Brothers? Well, at least Urban has.
He’s not the only one in Nashville currently enamored with yacht rock. Songs like Morgan Wallen’s “7 Summers” have brought those relaxed West Coast vamps all the way to country radio. And last month, Lady A’s Charles Kelley launched Y’all Aboard on SiriusXM’s Yacht Rock Radio, where he spins his favorite soft tunes alongside guests like Russell Dickerson, Dustin Lynch, Trisha Yearwood, and more. The goal, he said in an Instagram post, is to show that country music has “a lot more than you think” in common with the genre most often associated with poolside easy listening, R&B tones, and jazzy riffs.
“Honestly, I think people would be surprised how many and how much country artists are obsessed with yacht rock,” Kelley tells Rolling Stone. “There’s just something comforting about that music. The themes are a lot of ‘love lost’ and ‘how I done my woman wrong,’ which lines up pretty well with classic country. Even some of those intricate chord structures echo older country. But mostly, it’s a lot of escapism. It’s feel-good music, just good vibes and the kind of stuff you’d play on the beach. Country artists don’t necessarily talk about it much, but yacht rock is one of those genres I keep seeing come up again and again. Everyone loves it.”
Though Kelley has yet to announce any sort of yacht-rock project, he did recently release a new single featuring Maren Morris that is a more adult contemporary-driven rework of his song “Can’t Be Alone Tonight.” With crisp production, cascading keys, and sharp harmonies, it’s yacht-adjacent indeed.
It all raises the question: Is mature country-pop just a landlocked cousin of yacht rock? Turns out, Kelley’s posture that the genres intersect more than meets the eye is pretty astute, as long as you are loose on your definition (which many yacht rock connoisseurs are not, to be fair). Artists like Ronnie Milsap and Jimmy Webb easily straddle both — the website and podcast Yacht or Nyacht ranks Milsap’s “Where Do the Nights Go” at 60.5.
Plenty of others borrow its dockside aesthetic, Kenny Chesney and Zac Brown Band among them. Dolly Parton has one of Nashville’s highest-ranking Yacht or Nyacht songs, with 1980’s “Some Old Fool,” which also includes plenty of disco influences (a combination which, thanks to Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert, and others, is seeing its own twangy resurgence). And this fall, if you’re headed to Old Dominion’s Moon Crush Beach Vacation festival, you’ll be treated to a set from Nashville Yacht Club Band, who bill themselves as the city’s premiere Seventies and Eighties cover band.
“We’ve put on a monthly show at Scoreboard in Music Valley for a few years now,” says Nashville Yacht Club Band leader Jay Barclay. “This is a very traditional country venue, so I honestly wasn’t sure how it would go over when they approached us with the idea, but it’s turned out to be a huge success. People just can’t get enough of these songs. They provide a little escape from everyday stress.”
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So where does Urban land on the yacht or nyacht scale? “Me and the other yacht rock guys are awfully picky when it comes to the definition of yacht rock, as anyone who has seen the HBO doc(k)umentary might be aware,” says “Hollywood” Steve Huey, host of the Yacht or Nyacht podcast. “The track listing is about half songs we think are yacht rock, and half songs that most people think are yacht rock but which don’t really have the kind of jazz/R&B/Steely Dan influence that we think is necessary for the term to apply. On the genuine yacht-rock songs, I’m impressed by the sense of groove that seems to be present. It’s not just soft and mellow, it seems to get more at the heart of what made this music tick than some of the other recent revival attempts I’ve heard.
“If I didn’t know it was Keith Urban,” Huey continues, “I wouldn’t have guessed this was a country artist, aside from a real occasional vocal twang on the genuine yacht songs.”
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Yacht or not, Urban seems at home on Flow State, a land where he can shred cringe-free and glisten up the production as much as his heart desires. Urban has only sounded vaguely country for a while now, and the crooning lane of “Magnet and Steel,” with lovely harmonies from Little Big Town, really works.
In April, he joined Yacht Rock Revue, arguably the kings of the yacht-rock revival bands, onstage in Georgia for a pair of songs. And at CMA Fest in Nashville earlier this month, he brought out McDonald for his Nissan Stadium performance of “We Go Back” and looked like he was having the time of his life. Whether y’llacht rock becomes a new genre is still yet to be seen. Then again, maybe it’s been here all along.
