“You have to know Donald’s sense of humour. It was a total set-up”: Did Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen really tell the people behind the Yacht Rock movie to “F*** off”?

Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen seated in a hotel lobby in the early 1990s.

Yacht rock is one of the more unexpected musical success stories of the last couple of decades. Conceived in the 2000s as an online series that semi-ironically celebrated the super-smooth easy-listening sounds of the 70s and 80s, it went on to become a legitimate phenomenon that ultimately re-popularised the likes of Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross and Toto.

Surprisingly, many of the people it sought to lovingly lampoon actually had no problem with the series, or the idea of ‘yacht rock’ as a whole. Among them was quintessential yacht rock poster boy Michael McDonald.