Featured Conversation: Talking to Yacht Rock Expert "Hollywood" Steve Huey

Published on Apr 3, 2025

Today’s interview was conducted by IHTOV correspondent Jason Bombach 

 I’ll be honest with you dear reader. When Michele said she wouldn’t be doing interviews anymore on this site and I stepped in to interview anyone she had already scheduled, I thought I was making a clever play at meeting someone famous. She had already interviewed Steve Sladkowski of PUP, Mike Huguenor of Jeff Rosenstock and John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. Surely if the thought of talking to whoever she had on the calendar had her anxiety so ratcheted up, they must be a bona fide superstar. Maybe I’d be talking to Dave Grohl or a proper Beatle! What I did not expect was a talk with the host of Beyond Yacht Rock, aficionado of the subgenre, “Hollywood” Steve Huey.

  I don’t say this to disparage Steve in any way. It’s just that, I wasn’t even aware that there was a yacht rock world, much less that someone could make a whole podcast about it. But in the world of yacht rock, Steve might as well be Ringo Starr. He starred in a web mockumentary about the subgenre, hosts an on again, off again podcast deciding if artist are yacht or nyacht (as well as create new, even more obscure sub-subgenres), made an actual documentary streaming on Max and generally evangelizes this smooth corner of the musical landscape to all who will listen. 

  Now, this may come as a big shock but I’m not much of a yacht rock guy myself, so as I got on a call with Steve, I was hoping to get a new perspective and some insight into his world. Who knows? Maybe he could sell me on it and this time next week I’d be setting proverbial sail on my stereo aboard the HMS Steely Dan. 

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

IHTOV: Why yacht rock and how much of it is a genuine love of this type of smooth music, and how much of it is commitment to the bit?

SH: This is exploring commitment through bits. This is 100% genuine love of the music. But also, we needed an idea for a show. I don’t know how much the audience has, has seen of the HBO yacht rock documentary. But we were participating in this combination Film Festival slash comedy group that happened once a month in LA. It was called Channel 101.

IHTOV: I’m very familiar. I watched a lot of the cartoons that came out.

SH: So you have a frame of reference. So we were trying to think of shows for that. The whole premise was that you made a five minute show,and then the audience voted to either renew or cancel it. It was supposed to be a five minute television show with a whole complete story arc told within that five minutes, ideally, right? So we were trying to think of a thing, and the other guys were brainstorming and Dave Lyons, who played Coco Goldstein in the yacht rock web series, he’s a location manager and he knew somebody who had a houseboat, and he was like, “Guys, I can get us a houseboat.”. They were working up this whole idea of, there’s these jewel thieves, they live on a houseboat, and the whole soundtrack is going to be like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, all that smooth 80s stuff. At some point, I believe it was Hunter who played Kenny Loggins said, why don’t we just do the show about the music? 

  At this point, JD had started calling it yacht rock. Because you look at the cover of Loggins and Messina’s Full Sail album, they’re on a boat. They’re very, very happy to be on a boat. You look at the back cover, they’re so happy. They’re so happy the shirts come off. They’re in the California sun on a boat. They’re making rock star money. They had boats. They went sailing and then a few sang about it. Obviously, you have Christopher Cross’ Sailing that comes along in 1979-80, just this kind of nautical imagery that seems to pop up often enough that it’s like, did all these guys do this? Was this everyone’s hobby? So that’s kind of what it became in our heads. And then, you think about albums like Steely Dan’s Aja, that are this crystal clear, high fidelity sound. It’s used as a test record for the fancy audio system, the Hi Fi stereo systems and high end speakers at the time. It’s like, oh, well, there’s music that is designed to be played on really expensive equipment and they hire all the most expensive top of the line session musicians to make it. So the kind of the expense combined with the nautical imagery was yacht rock. That’s obviously the name for this kind of music. Then once we did the show, it just kind of went slowly, gradually viral over time, and then became the internet’s idea of what that music should be called also.

IHTOV: It’s not often you get to coin a term, especially a genre.

SH: Especially if you’re not like an academic type critic or a journalist of some sort.

IHTOV: I’ve definitely called my own music different names that have not caught on, like vomit rock or whatever. People are like, I don’t want to listen to it. I want to talk about it.

SH: Is vomit rock, where the vocalist is like a death metal type genre?

IHTOV: No, vomit rock is everything is on all the time, and it just sounds like it was recorded in a box. It’s the opposite of yacht rock. Like when yacht rock goes wrong.

SH: Every once in a while, there’ll be somebody on the internet who pops out, like “Me and my friends were calling this yacht rock before the web series ever happened.”. Well, you didn’t make a web series about it, so nobody knew about it outside of you and your friends. Sorry, you don’t get credit.

IHTOV: You know when people go to a museum and they’re like, Oh, I could do that? But you didn’t. So guess who gets millions of dollars and guess who gets to look at it?

SH: We did not get a million dollars.

IHTOV: Talking about yacht rock, not as lucrative as yacht rock.

SH: No. Making a web series where you don’t own the rights to somebody else’s copyrighted material. (laughs)

IHTOV: So yacht rock, vaguely defined as like that, late 80s, smooth music, as you call it.

SH: Late 70s, early 80s. Okay, roughly, roughly ‘76 to ‘84 is the glory years of that sound.

IHTOV: How did you get into it?

SH: I initially got into it right before we started doing the web series, a few months earlier, I just turned 30, and I was like, “All right, I’m old now.” (Because 30 years old is obviously so old.). Now it’s time to get into Steely Dan and start leaving parties early. So I went down to Amoeba Records here in LA and I bought all the Steely Dan albums on CD, crystal clear fidelity. It’s time to settle down. 

  Then all of a sudden, I sort of became one of the public faces of it, according to the internet. I had been exposed to a lot of this stuff some years earlier during my time working in-house of the All Music Guide. I was kind of a little brother who came along and started copy editing.Then they let me write some reviews of stuff they didn’t want to do themselves, like all the metal records, and they’d play this stuff around the office all the time. They were really into Hall and Oates as album artists, which I’d never met anybody like that. One boss would play Christopher Cross all the time. And people who’d say, “Can you please put Steely Dan back on? Can we hear ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ for the 100th time this week?

IHTOV: It sounds like being trapped in an elevator.

SH: It really felt like being trapped in an elevator. I was in my early 20s. I was busy discovering all the loud music I’d missed out on over the years, you know, just being in high school and having missed out on all the stuff that came before me, and I was not ready for that music in my early 20s. It wasn’t until I got into my 30s that I was like, “Okay, I’m starting to run out of energy just a little bit. I need something to calm down.”

IHTOV: I would be worried about it like a 17 year old who’s like, Steely Dan’s my favorite band. I’d be like, man, you gotta live.

SH: Oh man! The kids today, they’re more into Steely Dan than I was. I worry about the modern world for them, because, like, why? Why do they need to calm down this much? Then I think about and, oh, there’s a lot of different reasons they need to calm the fuck down this much.

IHTOV: So how exactly did the web show turn into a podcast?

SH: It took a long time. We did the web show, mostly over 2005-2006. After Episode 10, we didn’t get voted back at Channel 101. It was a side story that the audience didn’t follow very well, so we didn’t get voted back. But JD Ryzner, the official internet’s coin of the coiner of the term yacht rock, he’d still had a couple ideas for episodes in mind of how he wanted to wrap everything up. 

  So a couple years later, we did episode 11 and we kind of toured behind it, like we’d done a few live screenings of these episodes around the country in what at the time were known as hipster enclaves, you know, like Brooklyn or Williamsburg or Austin or San Francisco, Chicago, and people would just show these things at a bar for free and clean up on drink money. Then once in a while, they’d fly us out to make a personal appearance and introduce it. So we had motivation to make more of them. JD had an idea for a finale that was originally going to be the most dangerous game. They’re going to kidnap all these guys to an island and make them write soundtrack hits, and that evolved into the whole “We Are the World” alien invasion plot. 

  Anyway, that was the wrap up. And, you know, at the time, JD, he got a writing agent out of it. He was working jobs, so he was kind of off on his career. It took a while before we really reconvened as a group. Hunter, Dave Lyons and I kind of all went off to our respective behind the scenes entertainment career fields. When the 10th anniversary happened in 2015, we kind of got back together, and Sirius XM was, I think, just starting their yacht rock channel around that time.

IHTOV: That’s so wild.

SH: Yea. People were still talking about this stuff and the term had become adopted by the wider pop culture landscape. JD and Hunter and I got back together and just did an hour of material for an hour long show for Sirius. We just kind of picked out songs that Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins were involved in creating that were done by other artists. Afterwards, we were like, “Wow, that was fun.”. Podcasting was just taking off and we started doing a podcast called Beyond Yacht Rock, where the gimmick was we’d come up with a new genre name every episode, hoping another one of these would take off and go viral. 

IHTOV:You hope to capture that lightning twice. 

SH: We’re still trying, and it hasn’t worked out yet, but we’re still going. We decided every 10th episode is going to be a yacht rock themed episode where we explore some kind of sub style of yacht rock. First one we did, we called it Nyacht Rock. These are songs everybody thinks are yacht rock, but actually are nyacht. That’s where we started trying to really nail down what we thought yacht rock was, what it had meant to us when we came up with it. Which maybe we couldn’t completely articulate at the time, but, you know, a decade having gone by, we’ve kind of figured out that’s what I think is yacht rock.

  What we kind of settled on was, it’s this sub-style of soft rock. It’s not just that it’s smooth. It’s not really about the lyrics so much. It’s about the sound. It’s almost always influenced to some degree by black music, jazz, R&B. It’s got this crossover feel to it, where these white guys start out doing this kind of updated Blue Eyed Soul with all these session musicians. Then some R&B artists hear it, and some of these guys start working with Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Quincy Jones family of productions, and Ray Parker Jr. who started off as a session musician and became a successful R&B artist in his own right. It just becomes this cross cultural dialog that happens. It starts out at the height of disco, so there’s these white guys trying to put disco flourishes on their stuff to make sure it becomes a hit. 

  Then in the immediate post disco era, it became a way for all these artists, white or black, to try and get on the radio, because disco disappeared all of a sudden. There’s a vacuum and yacht rock tries to fill it. You have all these black artists who can’t get on pop radios. It’s like this sudden, almost resegregation. So you have guys like Lionel Richie thinking, “Shit, I got to do Adult Contemporary records now. That’s when Quincy Jones comes out with The Dude album, which we call yacht soul. He kind of comes out with the definitive take on that sound. 

  So kind of in between Off the Wall and Thriller is where yacht rock is really in its commercial prime, and that’s where a lot of the cult classic records come out. Once you start nerding out about this style, you start to discover these cult classics and think, “Nobody knows about this!

”

IHTOV: That’s one of my favorite things about collecting records. I go down deep rabbit holes of genres where I’m just like, all right, you got to hear this random band from Nigeria. I swear they’re the best thing you’ve ever heard, you know? And people look at me like, I don’t even like the top level of the genre you’re talking about. And you want me to go like, eight layers down?

SH: That’s the thing that gets people into yacht rock, is, once you get through the top artists in the genre, you can do a deep dive down a rabbit hole and keep finding stuff. 

  To loop it back around, once we did the Nyacht Rock episode, we started getting all these questions on twitter from listeners. “Wait a minute, what about this song? Is this yacht rock? What about this song?” We got so many of these that we were just like, okay, we’re going to do a spin off podcast. It’s called the Yacht or Nyacht podcast. 

  We developed an extremely scientific scale. It’s called the Yachtski Scale, named after the great scientist, Eugene Yachtski, and it goes from 1 to 100. JD Hunter, Dave and I will pull any listener requests we get in, we each pull out a number from 1 to 100 of how yachty it is and how well it fulfills what our internal ideas of the parameters of the genre are, and we average them all together. Anything 50 and above is officially a yacht rock song. Anything 90 and above is essential yacht rock. That’s the genre. That’s the really genre defining stuff.

IHTOV: And I imagine there’s a spreadsheet somewhere.

SH: Oh yeah, there’s a spreadsheet. There’s a website called yachtornyacht.com, and there’s a Spotify list that one of our listeners keeps up for us. There’s a YouTube playlist that contains anything that’s not on Spotify. We just were getting too many requests to keep up with, so we made it now anyone can submit a request if they join our Patreon for a scant $2 a month. Then you can submit a song to be yachtskied. Then once we do your song, you can submit another song. We’ve got so many from that we’re about two three months behind. I’m catching up. So it seems to be working well as a very low end business model.

IHTOV: To go back to the other premise of discussing making up other new niche genres. What are some of your favorite new genres you come up with, besides yacht rock?

SH: I think my favorite one that I came up with, it was a catch all for those paranoid songs from the early 80s that are all like “I’m going crazy!”. Kind of like Men at Work’s “Who Can it Be Now”, Cheap Trick’s “Dream Police”, Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me”, that stuff. It’s this confluence of 1984, the George Orwell year coming up soon, and Reagan revived the Cold War, and we might have nuclear war with Russia any minute. L.A. is being flooded by high quality Columbian cocaine. It’s all this, this confluence of factors that all comes together to make these songs. And I decided the best name for that genre was George Orwave.

IHTOV: That’s so good.

SH: Each of us would be the captain for an episode, like we’d come up with the genre and the name for it, maybe with a little help, but usually, if we were the captain, it was mostly our thing. JD came up with a genre he called Camaro Summer, which is kind of arena rock type songs that are all about cars and summer and radio and drinking with your buddies. He said Camaro Summer has to uphold the five pillars of American Freedom!

IHTOV: I think my current favorite micro genre would be angry British talk singers. There’s bands like Thank, Sleaford Mods and Art Brut. The music’s great, and then there’s just a British guy who’s just like, “Yeah, this thing sucks.”.

SH: (affects English accent) We talk about politics.

IHTOV: I’m like, I don’t know why I like this so much, but it really hits a chord for me. Sleaford Mods is literally two guys, one makes the beats, and he just stands there with a beer at the laptop and the other guy’s just yelling into a microphone. Tour? You can do it in like a Ford Focus. You got the laptop? We’re good.

SH: Dave came up with a similar genre called Talkternative. It was kind of like good songs like that from the 90s, like King Missile’s “Detachable Penis” or Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper.” The same thing where they’re not really singing, they’re just telling you about something happening.

IHTOV: So this is the website about collecting vinyl. Is yacht rock easy to collect on vinyl? Is it hard to find?

SH: When we started getting into this stuff, we tell the story in the HBO doc, we’re all broke, we’re all working really low level jobs in the entertainment industry, paying rent in LA, there’s not much left over. What can we do for cheap entertainment? And JD and Hunter and Dave all collect vinyl. I collect CDs. (Sorry, I know it’s a vinyl site.) So they would all go to Amoeba Records, and they would just go through the dollar bins and see what was there. At the time, 2004-2005, it was a lot of soft rock. It was a lot of people selling off their old mellowing out records. And nobody would buy it, nobody could sell them. So they just marked them down to $1 a piece. That’s how, all my friends got Doobie Brothers with Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins and Steely Dan and Toto, all that stuff on vinyl for super cheap. I think the prices have gone up since then. It’s probably our fault. But you could get all that stuff fairly easily at the time that we did it.

  Then depending on how deep a dive you do, certain things are cult items that have only really been reissued in Japan. How much are you willing to pay as an import price for this jazzy soft rock record from Southern California that nobody in America wants to buy to the point where it’s never been reissued here. It’s only in Japan because they still collect physical media there, and they love this stuff. Yacht rock as a sound is really big in Japan and in Scandinavia, Sweden especially, because the sound translates across language barriers. I guess, smooth, sophisticated sound - people like it, and it doesn’t really matter that much what the lyrics are.

IHTOV: I think there’s a direct line between yacht rock and Japanese city pop. I think there’s, like, an absolutely good line right there.

SH: Yes, I think it might have been episode 50 of the Yacht or Nyacht podcast, where we did a deep dive into city pop and tried to find the crossovers. Something that happens a lot with American yacht rock is you will hear a lot of songs ripping off the piano part from “What a Fool Believes”, and you hear that in city pop too. You can, you can go through and start finding stuff like that.There’s multiple songs that rip off “What You’re Going to do for Me” by Chaka Khan, which is like the definitive yacht soul number from 1980. You can hear one of the big songs that went viral on the internet from city pop was “Stay With Me” by Mickey Matsubara. You listen to that like, this sounds familiar, and then you go to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. Oh, they’re just borrowing bits of “It’s The Falling In Love”, the album track by David Foster and Carol Bayer Sager. It almost works like sampling. It’s like they’re playing it live, but they’re just kind of grabbing bits and pieces of these American soul and Blue Eyed Soul records that they like, and then kind of building a new song around it almost.

IHTOV: That’s one of my favorite things to see, when other countries take American culture and they’ll kind of make their own version of it.

SH: They make their own version of it for their own country and their own audience.

IHTOV: Hot tip for any of the readers, there is a store in New York City that sells Japanese imports only. I forget the name of it, [Editors Note: It’s Face Records] the whole store is just Japanese imports. So you might be able to find some stuff there. Anyway, what’s a must have yacht Rock Records?

SH: All right, so I’ll give you some no brainers, and then I’ll give you some cult classics. The obvious ones are going to be like the Doobie Brothers, Minute by Minute, Christopher Cross, self titled debut, Toto IV, Kenny Loggins. 

  Kenny Loggins is a little bit different because he only dabbles in yacht rock. He’s just so good at it that he’s still on the Mount Rushmore. His albums were always designed as, like, I need a wide variety of material for my live show. But I think a record like Keep the Fire or High Adventure is going to get you to the core of Kenny’s yacht rock sound, and it’s got his core yacht rock classics.

  Obviously Steely Dan’s Aja. People will argue whether Steely Dan is yacht rock, but they’re the root of the whole family tree. They kind of put all these session musicians through Steely Dan boot camp, and then they went out on their own, and brought the sound out to more mainstream pop records.

IHTOV: One of my heroes is Steve Albini, who famously, famously hated Steely Dan. RIP.

SH: I wish Steve Albini had lived to comment on the yacht rock documentary.

IHTOV: That would have been a great talking head to have.

SH: Steely Dan, like you hear the yacht rock, you kind of get into it a little bit with “Ricky Don’t Lose That Number”, but you really get into it on “Katie Lied”, when you start hearing Michael McDonald doing the background vocals. They’re finding ways to bring R&B into their sound, which they didn’t really have in the first three or so records very much. The Royal Scam, they go to New York and they hire Bernard Purdy to be the drummer alongside Chuck Rainey, their favorite bassist. You hear different ways of getting R&B in there without having Michael McDonald being prominent. It all builds into Aja and then Gaucho has a lot of yacht rock on it as well.

  Thenyou also get into the yacht soul side of things, where the R&B world starts to adopt this, like sophisticated, jazzy sound, in the middle of the beginning of the quiet storm radio format. You get Earth, Wind and Fire working with David Foster on the album I Am from 1979. That’s the one with “After the Love Has Gone”, which was written by David Foster and Jay Graydon, and Bill Champlin, who ended up joining Chicago as the co-lead singer alongside Peter Cetera. 

  Every producer in this world has their core favorite session guys and some of them, like David Foster and Jay Graydon become producers. Jay Graydon is the one I really wanted to bring up here, because he produces a couple of Manhattan Transfer albums that have a little bit of yacht rock on them. The big thing is he produces Al Jarreau, and Jarreau has this sort of yacht rock trilogy from ‘80 to ‘83 on the albums, This Time, Breakin’ Away and Jarreau. It’s the stuff that a lot of people don’t really think of as yacht rock, but it’s some of the creative peaks of the genre. Al Jarreau is such a good jazz vocalist, he can pretty much do anything, But Jay Graydon is putting him in these pop and R&B settings to try and get him hit records at the same time, to keep him a viable recording artist. It’s a whole hybrid crossover thing, and it really, really works very well on there, on those records, to me. 

 Then if you start to get into the cult classic, boy, I’ll just drop a few of them. So there was a one-off band called Airplay. It was David Foster and Jay Graydon and a bunch of guys from Toto and this other guy they got to sing the high parts named Tommy Funderburk. It’s just David Foster is still trying to prove himself as a producer. So there’s a lot of everything but the kitchen sink. There’s just horn arrangements, and there’s all these multi sections like, they change up the groove here, and they do this other thing here. It’s just session guys using all their training, just running amok in the studio, doing everything they know how to do on one record. It’s kind of glorious. That album has a song called “Nothing You Can Do About It” that was originally cut by the Manhattan Transfer. Airplay redid it with their own version. To us, that’s one of the defining yacht rock songs. Stylistically, it’s, it’s just like, God, why doesn’t everybody know how great this song is. 

  There was another studio only group called Maxus and it was produced by Michael Omartian. These other session guys, Robbie Buchanan on keyboards, Michael Landau, who was a childhood friend of Steve Lukather, on guitar. Jay Gruska was the lead singer. He’d done a couple solo albums that were pretty yachty back in the day. None of the Airplay songs ever came close to a hit. Maxus never did either. It’s like a perfect yacht rock album, like every song is just, holy shit. It’s so Yachty. It’s so smooth. The record company is trying to hit gold with the next Toto, and they’re not finding the next Toto.

IHTOV: You never find the first wave hit again. It’s, like, one of those things that you just like, you can’t really capture.

SH: Can we capture it again? No, but we’re gonna try anyway.

IHTOV: We’re gonna make a million things like it and hope.

SH: A third, really big cult classic that everybody gets into when they get into this stuff, there’s a group called Pages. It was the two guys from Mr. Mister, pre Mr. Mister, Richard Page and Steve George. These guys had a session career. Basically, if you couldn’t get Micheal McDonald to sing background on your song, you could hire Richard Page and Steve George, and they would give you Micheal McDonald’s sounding background vocals, but it took two guys to match Michael McDonald’s vocal range. So they kind of, they had an in on this session scene, and they formed their own group called Pages. Their third album, this is confusing, because two of their three albums are self titled, the third album is the second self-titled album. It’s from 1981. It was produced by Jay Graydon, and that’s their core yacht rock classic. It’s another one of those, every song is yachty, and it’s so rooted in the sound of Steely Dan. When you get into the real sophisticated side of this stuff, that’s what people get really obsessed with.

IHTOV: Well, we’re almost out of time, but I want to give you a chance to promo.

SH: All right, let me run back down our podcast. We have resumed the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast after a hiatus of several years. You can find that on our podcast feeds, wherever podcasts are fed. The Yacht or Nyacht

podcast is going strong. Join our Patreon to have your song yachtskied on the Yacht or Nyacht podcast. And we’ve been working on a book about the actual history of the genre that has gone on for too long, and we’re really trying to get it done in the wake of the documentary (steaming on Max), while people still remember who the fuck we are.

—

  Seeing as my free Zoom account meant we were out of time, Steve and I said our goodbyes and I was left to look up the records he had talked about. His obvious passion for yacht rock was infectious. I spent the next half hour falling down YouTube rabbit holes filled with men in unbuttoned shirts and feathered hair singing in high falsetto. There wasn’t a distortion pedal in sight. Just smooth sailing to cool vibes. 

  Did I become a new yacht head and run out to buy a captain’s hat and dubious amounts of cocaine? No. I’m still too prickly a punk to listen to anything this calm. It’s all still sounds like high-fi hold music to me. But I love that someone like Steve is out there loving it. This world is too full of people trying real hard to not care about anything and it sucks. After all, to be cringe is to be free. So give a shit about something. When I was younger (and an idiot), I would have railed against anything I deemed beneath my exceptional taste. But I’m old enough now to realize, just because I don’t like something, doesn’t make it bad. So why rock the boat? I’m just gonna drop the needle on a 90’s vomit rock record and sail on.

Jason Bombach is an aging left wing punk who makes music under the name History History, writes, and shoots film. But mostly he scrubs toilets for money and is an organizer for the IWW. Check out his YouTube channel Death to The Algorithm or don’t. Yell at him on Bluesky at thecurmudgeon.bsky.social

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