While his former bandmate John Oates has credited the rise of yacht rock with helping popularize their music, Daryl Hall seems to loathe the label.
When the topic of yacht rock is raised on the Broken Record podcast, Hall says, “This is something I don’t understand. First of all, yacht rock was a f****** joke by two jerk-offs in California and suddenly it became a genre. I don’t even understand it. I never understood it.”
Hall was referring to the fact that Yacht Rock originated as the name of a mockumentary web series created by J.D. Ryznar and Hunter D. Stair. Debuting in 2005, the series featured comedic portrayals of artists like Daryl Hall & John Oates, Steely Dan, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross and The Eagles.
“It’s just R&B with maybe some jazz in there,” Hall notes on the podcast. “It’s mellow R&B. It’s smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is.”
Hall also points out that he and Oates first enjoyed success on R&B radio before crossing over to pop, and their cross-genre sound confused the music industry.
“People misjudged us because they couldn’t label us,” he says. “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. It doesn’t describe anything anybody does.”
For his part, McDonald, the artist who’s probably most associated with yacht rock, said in 2008 that he found the web series “hilarious.”
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
