I’ve praised Bob Dylan’s recent albums of standards originally performed by Frank Sinatra, though my readers generally aren’t as impressed. Today’s song comes from Dylan’s second such album, 2016’s Fallen Angels.
This time around, I’ll let professional music critics do the heavy lifting. Here are a few quotes compiled on the album’s Wikipedia page.
Ah, the summer of 1995. I was working as a production assistant at a video studio in Boca Raton and befriended a couple of hip employees who introduced me to Garbage’s debut album.
They were hard rock types, and this album was a little harder than I normally go for, but I fell for it entirely anyway. Credit goes to the sexy, Scottish Shirley Manson, with whom I remain smitten to this day.
I’m wrapping up my two-week celebration of yacht rock with a song that really captures the era. Robbie Dupree’s ‘Steal Away’ has all the hallmarks of a great yacht rock song. It’s richly melodic, impeccably produced, smooth as all get-out and about nothing more or less than stealing away into the night with a forbidden love.
If only they were on a boat.
Thanks to Rob for suggesting Ambrosia as another entry in this yacht rock series. I know and like today’s song, ‘Biggest Part of Me,’ but I had no idea who performed it.
Ambrosia is an L.A. band that started in the mid 70s as a prog rock outfit but had their biggest success in 1980 with the album One Eighty, a yacht rock showcase.
While the yacht rock genre was at its peak in the late 70s and early 80s, the phrase “yacht rock” didn’t enter the lexicon until 2005. Writer/actor J.D. Ryznar created an online series titled Yacht Rock which dramatized the lives of the era’s top names, including Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins.
While people (and Sirius/XM Channel 70) have expanded the definition to include a wide range of soft rock, Ryznar and his collaborators take a very hard line on what they consider true yacht rock. They even maintain a website called Yacht or Nyacht? on which they measure the yacht-ness of songs and artists on a 100-point scale.
Meet Me In Montauk 