Don’t get Daryl Hall started on yacht rock.
During a recent appearance on the Broken Record podcast, Hall expressed agitation that Hall and Oates’ music keeps getting lumped in with the term “yacht rock.” “This is something I don’t understand. First of all, yacht rock was a fucking joke by two jerk offs in California and suddenly it became a genre,” Hall lamented. The “two jerk offs” likely refers to J. D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair, and Lane Farnham, who created the 2005 web series Yacht Rock and have since been credited with coining the term. “I don’t even understand it. I never understood it.”
He continued, genuinely irritated by the term’s persistence in popular music culture despite it being just an amalgam of other genres. “It’s just R&B with maybe some jazz in there,” he said. “It’s mellow R&B. It’s smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is.”
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Hall also elaborated more on his resistance to being classified as a yacht rock musician, citing his general resistance to being classified by any genre or movement. “People misjudged us because they couldn’t label us. They always came up with all this kind of crap, soft rock and yacht rock and all this other nonsense. And none of it, none of it really describes anything that I do really.”
Yacht rock hasn’t exactly made a comeback, but it’s resurfaced as a cultural phenomenon to dissect and debate. HBO’s Music Box: Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary revisited the genre last year, while some musicians from the era, like Hall, continue to question whether the label holds any meaning for them.
“Where the hell did we invent that thing that became called yacht rock?” asked Kenny Loggins in a 2022 interview. “Some of those are not great songs, but they have that smooth pop thing that became very popular for a period of time. I don’t know where it actually came from.” Michael McDonald, who is arguably one of the biggest figures in the entire yacht rock movement, also offered his thoughts on the term in the HBO documentary and on a recent episode of Kyle Meredith With…; check out the episode here.
Hall has been busy touring the US so far in 2025; after a brief UK run this month, Hall will head back to the US for a run of East Coast shows alongside Squeeze’s Glen Tilbrook in July. Get tickets to see Hall here. Meanwhile, if you were hoping Hall would reunite for more shows with longtime bandmate John Oates, it appears that yacht has sailed.
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