Yacht rock is a powerful musical force and Yächtley Crëw are fully invested – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

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By Dan Condon
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Yächtley Crëw have been thrilling US audiences with the finest yacht rock anthems for years. Now they're coming to Australia. (Supplied: Facebook)
Maybe you're in the supermarket, waiting for the lights to change or watching a film when you hear a familiar sound that stirs something inside of you.
It's music. Smooth, soulful, familiar music, and it immediately takes you back to a simpler time: Childhood car rides, schoolyard crushes, your parents' dinner parties — the sound coming through the speakers acts like a cerebral time machine.
This connection between music and memory has made the genre of yacht rock a powerful force for years now.
The term yacht rock comes from a 2005 viral video series that spoofed the major players of popular soft rock from the 1970s, like The Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Daryl Hall and John Oates, and Toto.
The series, which combined absurdist comedy with a genuine love for this aging radio rock, lasted just 10 episodes, but the name stuck.
In 2017, a group of Californian musicians formed a band dedicated to bringing these same AM radio hits of the 70s and 80s to life. They didn't just lean into the music, they fully embraced the term 'yacht rock' and its accompanying aesthetic.
Evident from their puntastic name and insistence on dressing in nautical attire, Yächtley Crëw don't take themselves too seriously.
"We're like the KISS of soft rock," frontman Philly Ocean beams from his home in California.
"All of our fans are called crewpies, they come with 15 to 20 of their friends. They come dressed like sailors."
For music designed to be easy to listen to, there's something surprisingly visceral about these soft, smooth radio hits.
Just hearing the soulful opening chords of the 1976 Hall and Oates hit 'Rich Girl', or the big singalong choruses of Boz Scaggs' 1977 party-starter 'Lido Shuffle' transports music fans like Ocean to another place and time.
"Some of my youngest memories are listening to this music in the car with my dad and my mum, you know, Hall and Oates and Steely Dan and Toto … that was just always playing," Ocean says.
While these songs are generally inoffensive, some people have a powerful disdain for it. They could think of nothing worse than listening to these often-mawkish lovesick ballads.
Most people, Ocean reckons, fall somewhere in the middle. At some moments of our lives, yacht rock seems odious but, with enough time and space, we tend to welcome it back into our lives.
"I feel like I've had a similar path to many people where there have been different eras of my own life where this music has ebbed and flowed, it's come back in and it's gone away," he says.
They weren't alone, immediately finding a hefty group of like-minded souls who wanted to dance and sing along to nostalgic hits, most of which have aged remarkably well.
"We had hundreds and hundreds of people from the get-go," he says. "People were smiling and just super into it and it's only gotten bigger and bigger."
It took a lot of work to get to that first gig though.
The musicians who originally wrote and performed these songs were almost always prodigiously talented, and while the music is easy to listen to, it's notoriously difficult to play.
"When we started in this band, I had to learn how to sing these songs," Ocean says. "We were playing three hours a night, that's like 45 songs, multiple days a week.
"These songs are incredibly high, they're incredibly hard, the harmonies are really tight.
"Not only that, but can I just tell you, memorising that many words, it was crazy.
"We have 115-ish songs in our repertoire. I mean, all I did for three-and-a-half months before we even played our first show was listen to these songs on repeat to try and get the cadence and the all the words in my head."
The songs needed to be a part of him, Ocean says, because Yächtley Crëw are determined to offer their audience an experience that goes beyond musicality.
"When you do a show like this, you don't want to have to be thinking about the words, you want it to be in your body," he says.
"You want it to be literally in your muscle memory as much as possible, because we're doing so many other things. I'm engaging with the crowd, we have choreography, we have little bits that we do on stage to amplify the show. My mind has to be there.
"If I'm thinking about the words, all of a sudden all that other stuff starts to go out the window."
It's not just the singing that needs to be on point, a misplayed riff or solo can be jarring for an audience who have, in many cases, been listening to these songs for their entire lives.
"All these songs have such iconic riffs. You can't just, like, do your own thing with it, because the audience will not be satisfied. They want to hear what they remember from decades of listening to these songs. That was really our commitment from the very get-go."
With an armoury of more than 100 songs, Yächtley Crëw don't find choosing what to play at their live shows easy.
Ocean says these include Christopher Cross's Ride Like The Wind, Toto's 'Africa', and Ruper Holmes's 'Escape (The Pina Colada Song)'.
"But there's also some leeway, and there's so many good songs in this genre that we can keep the show fresh by just rotating some of those other songs. Like, 'Hold The Line' [another Toto hit] is not in every show.
"And some people would even argue that that's not yacht rock, but it absolutely fits in that genre, in our opinion, and people lose their minds when we play it."
Which brings us to every music nerd's favourite pastime: complaining about genre designations and what does and doesn't fit.
The most particular boffins will quickly tell you that a song is blue-eyed soul or AM-gold rather than yacht rock. That the Carpenters' lack of jazz or soul influence precludes them from inclusion in the nautically named genre.
Most music fans probably don't really care enough to wade into such a debate, but Ocean welcomes the conversation.
"I think it's really fun that people get so passionate about what is and what isn't yacht rock," he says.
But Yächtley Crëw don't play by those rules — they're happy to throw Elton John's 'I'm Still Standing' or Paul Simon's 'You Can Call Me Al' into their sets — but every song they choose must be a good fit.
"I like to call [some] songs yacht-rock-adjacent. If you play those songs, no-one's going to be mad, because they fit the vibe. They're fun, they're nostalgic, they have a little bit of that Southern California groove.
"At the end of the day, we're a live show, and it's really about the vibe."
If you're going to witness the Yächtley Crëw extravaganza when the band make their maiden voyage to Australia, Ocean wants to be very clear what's expected of you.
"This is a participatory event," he says. "We want you dancing. We want you singing your face off. It is going to be one of the best nights of your life."
Yächtley Crëw kick off their tour in Perth on May 12, before playing shows in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
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