Wide Open Spaces: Announcing a New Music Column Born of My Yacht Rock Shame

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All the fun’s in how you say a thing, as Robert Frost wrote. Please enjoy this essay on the power of nostalgia and new music. It’s all origin story for my column announcement.

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The first time I landed on the channel this past summer, it was a novelty, an ironic diversion. I was exploring the possibilities of our new car’s trial Sirius XM subscription, finding old channel favorites like Willie’s Roadhouse, Real Jazz . . . and what was this?!

Yacht Rock Radio.

Nothing but Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Robbie Dupree, and other charter members of the Smooth Sailing Club! I turned up the volume.

Despite my irony, I’d never dismissed yacht rock as thoroughly banal or vapid. Yeah, the genre featured too many male narrators who were reduced to lovesick fools thanks to callous lay-dees (hello feminist backlash). Yet I heard elite studio musicians and killer chord progressions inside its smoothness. Yacht Rock Radio’s regular programming of Steely Dan, whether they belong on the channel or not, affirmed that the genre wasn’t all bad.

But I wasn’t listening for musical value, anyway.

Before these songs were dubbed yacht rock in 2005, my sisters and I called them “Lake Afton Songs.” They conjured the late ‘70s/turn of the ‘80s when we were preschoolers/grade schoolers spending summer days at the lake with my Mom, Aunt, and cousins. In our sibling vocabulary, Lake Afton Songs mean learning to swim, vinyl chaise lounge chairs, baby oil tans, and coolers stocked with canned Tab and jarred Kool-Aid mixed fresh that morning.

Even more, Lake Afton Songs mean time stretching far enough to watch dappled shade move across the lake shore as easy-listening music plays from a portable AM/FM radio, until one of us kids knocks its silver antenna out of place and we have to ask for help to tune back to “Steal Away” or “Still The One.”

Lake Afton Songs is that idyllic childhood mode of being in which the world is small and warm yet all life’s possibilities are still wide open.

The next few times in the car, I pressed over to SiriusXM’s Yacht Rock Radio by rote. My attraction to this music didn’t register as midlife nostalgia because my family’s category of Lake Afton Songs made yacht rock feel private and particular to me. Of course, everyone’s nostalgia is distinctive, as I’d usually realize, but just then yacht rock was tranquilizing the reason right out of me.

Yacht rock was put on hold in late June when my family took a road trip from Colorado to my son’s Vermont summer camp, during which we listened to comedy audiobooks (Colin Jost’s A Very Punchable Face was a family favorite). On the Maine coast in July, I wrote liner notes, so adventurous improvised music was on repeat in my earbuds.

Still, my musical midlife crisis re-emerged. Driving through Acadia National Park one afternoon, Mozart’s Requiem came up on my iPhone shuffle. This music had a grandeur, natural order, and depth of feeling equal to the sublime coastal landscape. Soon I was turning to Mozart’s final piece of music in Maine as rotely as I’d turned to yacht rock back home. Two sides of the same coin, nostalgia and death obsession.

(Video: Leonard Bernstein conducts the Requiem’s “Confutatis” and a glacially slow “Lacrimosa” in 1989 when Bernstein is only a year from his own passing.)

“The Requiem is exactly the kind of music we can listen to with no kid in the car to object,” I enthused, watching waves slam the rocky Maine shoreline.

“It gets to be a bit much, though,” my husband said. “I mean, all the time.”

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Not Today, Satan

At home in August, now beset with primary insomnia, I settled back into the yacht rock channel as if I’d never left it.

Soothing music is fine. This was something else. For me, yacht rock was becoming mother’s little helper, the aural equivalent of Valium, of going gentle into that good night. This was a wild blue yonder of calm sea sounds, but in a boat where you couldn’t step out on deck to hoist a sail or feel the salty breeze.

I’d never been someone who wanted to be mollified or even just calmed by music, anyway. I was proud—maybe too proud—of my nearly two decades of finding fresh, inventive, stimulating music, often of an improvised variety, to cover for NPR’s All Things Considered and elsewhere. I liked to share music that didn’t get much attention otherwise, and loved the challenge of getting experimental albums across with the strength of my storytelling alone. Traveling to the ends of the earth to discover new sounds and fresh presentations was a necessary way of life.

With fellow writer Shannon Effinger on a music-seeking trip in 2019

For most of my adult life, engaging with contemporary art, literature, and music amounted to a religious practice. Then during the pandemic, my association with NPR and other venues ended, and with it, my working need to seek out new music. Now just a couple of years later I was driving my kid to the pool stoned on yacht rock. How far the mighty had fallen.

You’re probably suspicious of epiphanies, and for good reason. Change more often comes about cumulatively than in a flash of insight; epiphanies smack of oracles, burning bushes, the stuff of Lives of the Saints.

Still, my yacht rock change of heart did come in a single epiphanic moment.

One August morning I was pulling out of Costco, trying to relax after the store’s oversized bumper cart consumer madness (for the love of G*d, wear closed-toed shoes in Costco, friends). The yacht rock channel was there for me.

“She comes dow-owwwwn from Yellow Mountain.”

It was Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire.”

I do not like this song, I thought. Should I be listening to this yacht rock channel at all?

As an avid, broad-ranging childhood reader who had too many librarians press horse books on me, I could appreciate the song’s underlying darkness, though. You may or may not recall that in “Wildfire” both a pony and pony-loving girl are dead. They’re spirits. Guess that’s where a love of horse books leads, I joked to myself in the car.

I remembered columnist Dave Barry’s joke about the song’s “killing frost” being a greater threat to garden tomatoes than to horses. I remembered how I took David Letterman’s bizarre obsession with “Wildfire” in the aughts as a sign that his retirement could be nigh.

And just like that, the yacht rock fog lifted.

“Not today, Satan!” I said to Sirius XM’s Yacht Rock Radio and touchscreened over to our local jazz station. There I heard the drummer Nate Smith’s “Attitude” followed by Artemis’s “Lights Away From Home.” Fresh originals with stirring improvisation. I’d found my way back. I was in my spiritual home.

Wide Open Spaces: Against the Dying of the Light

If I’m going to have a musical midlife crisis, it might as well be an active 18th-century death meditation.

It just so happens that the Colorado College choir will focus exclusively on Mozart’s Requiem this fall. I joined up. In late November, after a few months of rehearsal, I’ll don all-black concert attire and take the performance stands in lofty Shove Chapel where 50 minutes of singing Mozart’s Requiem will initiate me into the august graces of middle age. I’ll enter the piece and face death with Mozart to come fully alive.

Or maybe I’ll just get back to singing a little again. When art is one’s religion, results may vary.

As for listening, it’s time to mount a strong resistance to nostalgia, which for anyone over 40 is only recommended in small doses, if at all. My soul—probably yours, too—thrives on the possibilities, the challenges, the vistas of new music. And what’s Substack for if not to give ourselves the writing venues we need?

My new music column Wide Open Spaces will run each month here at Call & Response just before Bandcamp Friday so that all of the profits from any Bandcamp sales can go to artists.

Artists are making deep, beautiful music that gets so little attention in today’s consolidated media landscape. As I did for NPR, with Wide Open Spaces I’ll favor new music that might be otherwise overlooked. I may cover ten recordings; I may cover two. This coverage may take the form of writing, audio commentaries, or TikTok reels. I’ll leave it up to me.

The first Wide Open Spaces column is scheduled for October 4th. Please support my efforts here with a paid subscription if you can.

Most of all, please send new music for consideration in the column. Because we all need it.

P.S. Here’s a version of “Wildfire” I like, performed by The Langley Schools’ haunting child choir in 1976, a time before the internet could deliver everything everywhere all at once. The kids inhabit the song like it’s their only chance to connect with its mysteries, which is how making music could feel back then—and can still feel now, if we let it.