I’m anchoring into Yacht Rock.
For the last couple of weeks, I have been head-down. Things like housework, long walks in the countryside, and generally chilling out have had to take a back seat as the impending target of wrapping up my coursework by the end of November looms large.
Sometimes, life needs to be temporarily unbalanced to reach goals, which is OK as long as it’s not out of whack for a long time.
My house is full of cobwebs, the larder is quite frankly weird due to my lack of focus on meaningful food shopping (peanut butter and green tea soup for lunch, anyone?), and I have to do emergency laundry procedures when Kev and I run out of undercrackers. (Oh, and please don’t ask why Kev isn’t helping around the house because this weekend, he was up a ladder clearing all the leaves from the gutters, putting the garden to bed for the winter, loading the dishwasher after meals, and regularly runs the hoover around to collect up the clouds of ginger fluff that Eddie sheds. We’re definitely a team).
Anyway, practically every spare hour I have is spent plodding through my studies. I make myself tea in a travel mug (when I make it in a cup, it goes cold before I finish it because I forget it’s there), and I stick the “Now That’s What I Call Yacht Rock” playlist on Spotify.
So, what the hell is Yacht Rock, and why am I listening to it?
Yacht Rock is the genre I used to haughtily roll my eyes to as a teenager when my mum wiggled her butt to it whilst listening to the Terry Wogan Show in the 80s.
When she was swaying to “Africa” by TOTO, I turned up the volume on “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads. If she started singing to “What a Fool Believes” by Christopher Cross, I’d storm out of the house to buy a can of Top Deck and a Marathon (yes, kids were allowed to buy shandy back then, and - fun fact for you - Mars called the UK bar Marathon because the original name, Snickers (named after a family horse), was thought to sound too much like knickers! They are releasing a limited run of correctly named Marathon bars this year to celebrate their 90th anniversary, and I want one!)
Yacht Rock was a term coined in 2005, following a series of the same name about yachting set in Southern California. Wikipedia says Yacht Rock is characterised by “high-quality production, breezy vocals and bouncy rhythms”. It’s about as high-brow as Babycham and cheese-and-pineapple-on-sticks, but whenever I hear it, it puts me in the zone to study.
This is because in one of the classroom sessions last year, my tutor mentioned a classic Yacht Rock song, “Escape”, by Rupert Holmes. You might know it better as the Pina Colada Song. If you don’t know it, the lyrics tell a complete story about a guy who’s bored with his marriage and answers an advert in a lonely hearts’ column to some racy bird who “likes pina coladas and getting caught in the rain”. He arranges to meet her in a bar, only to realise it was his wife all along, who was also game for a bit of off-piste. They laughed it off and lived happily ever after. (Yeah! Like that would happen in real life! There would be mutual murder or at the very least, they’d throw cocktails over each other!)
My tutor used this song to demonstrate how we all get absorbed in a story, no matter how weird (which is lucky because most of the tales I write about are pretty random).
Anyway, this song got stuck in my head like a brainworm, and I found it on Spotify. It happened to be on a playlist called “Now That’s What I Call Yacht Rock.” For some reason, it feels like the perfect soundtrack to study to—slightly upbeat and not distracting, except for causing me to absent-mindedly sing along to “Fool If You Think It’s Over” or “Can’t Fight This Feeling Any More”.
Technically, we call this “anchoring” where something, like a sound or a gesture, triggers a thought or behaviour. Music can be a strong anchor - and Yacht Rock weirdly now makes me feel like studying, even when I struggle to find the energy to do so.
Plus, it possibly gives me a warm memory of when the biggest problem in my day was thinking my mum was uncool, and I was enjoying my time at the bleeding edge of my own youth culture. But I can’t listen to post-punk music when studying because it makes me feel rebellious and fling my books over the room!
Do you ever soundtrack parts of your life? If so, what’s on your playlist, and how does it help you?