Yacht Rock Trivia
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46 free Yacht Rock trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
50 free Yacht rock trivia questions with answers. Yacht rock did not exist as a name until 2005, but the music has been on the water since 1975, and this quiz covers the whole marina: Michael McDonald and the Doobies, Steely Dan, Toto, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, Hall & Oates, Boz Scaggs, Rupert Holmes and the session players who linked them all. There are questions on the songs, the Grammys, the sampling, the tribute bands, the HBO documentary and the Channel 101 web series that gave the genre its name. It starts easy (which Toto song went to number one?) and drifts out to open water (who explained the band's name with a Latin phrase?), so it works for a party round, a themed cruise, or settling a 'yacht or nyacht' argument between friends. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia entry on the artist, song or album, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Steely Dan give up in 1974 and not take up again until 1993?
Touring
Touring ended with a Santa Monica show in July 1974: Becker and Fagen let the band go and hired session players track by track, and Steely Dan stayed off the road for 19 years.
Q 02Before the term yacht rock existed, what was the same music known as?
The West Coast sound
The West Coast sound was the original name, and it fit: the records came out of Los Angeles studios, where one small pool of elite session players kept turning up on each other's albums.
Q 03Which 1980 number one is often held up as yacht rock's anthem?
Sailing
Sailing grew out of Christopher Cross's teenage escapes on an older friend's boat, and he never expected so inward a song to be a hit, let alone a number one.
Q 04Christopher Cross was the first artist to do what at a single Grammy ceremony?
Win all four general-field awards
Win all four general-field awards: Record, Album and Song of the Year plus Best New Artist, with his debut beating Pink Floyd's The Wall to the album prize; nobody matched the sweep until Billie Eilish in 2020.
Q 05Which Kenny Loggins album track became a Doobie Brothers number one months later?
What a Fool Believes
What a Fool Believes appeared on Loggins's 1978 album Nightwatch five months before the Doobies' version; he wrote it with Michael McDonald after arriving at McDonald's house and hearing him play an unfinished fragment at the piano.
Q 06At the 1980 Grammys, 'What a Fool Believes' won Song of the Year and which other award?
Record of the Year
Record of the Year went to the Doobie Brothers' single, which beat Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem 'I Will Survive' in both top song categories; Michael McDonald also won an arranging Grammy for the track.
Q 07What did the Yacht Rock creators call the genre's hallmark upbeat rhythm?
The Doobie Bounce
The Doobie Bounce, named for the Doobie Brothers' syncopated groove, matters more to the creators than subject matter: they insist a song about boats or the sea is not yacht rock unless it sounds the part.
Q 08What term did the Yacht Rock creators invent in 2016 for songs wrongly labelled as part of the genre?
Nyacht
Nyacht is their verdict on songs filed under the genre by mistake, and it reaches some big names: by the creators' rules the Eagles, a fixture of yacht rock playlists, do not qualify at all.
Q 09Christopher Cross shared an Oscar for the theme song to which 1981 comedy?
Arthur
Arthur: Cross wrote its theme with Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, and its best-known line came from Peter Allen, who had thought of it years earlier while his plane circled New York waiting to land at JFK.
Q 10Steely Dan is named after an object in which William S. Burroughs novel?
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch features a sex toy called Steely Dan; Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who met at Bard College in 1967, borrowed the name when they formed their own band while working as staff songwriters for ABC Records.
Q 11Which 2000 Steely Dan comeback album won the Album of the Year Grammy?
Two Against Nature
Two Against Nature, the duo's first studio album in 20 years, took the 2001 prize ahead of Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, Radiohead's Kid A and albums by Beck and Paul Simon.
Q 12Jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter solos on the title track of which 1977 Steely Dan album?
Aja
Aja's title track pairs Shorter's tenor solo with Steve Gadd's drumming, but its multitrack master tape later went missing, so a planned surround-sound remix of the album had to be scrapped.
Q 13Michael McDonald's multi-tracked backing vocals are heard on which Steely Dan song?
Peg
Q 21Before going solo, Kenny Loggins was half of a duo with which musician?
Jim Messina
Jim Messina, late of Buffalo Springfield and Poco, was only meant to produce Loggins's 1971 solo debut; he sang and played on so much of it that the album carried both names, and the pair stayed together until 1976.
Q 22Which Kenny Loggins song spent three weeks at number one on the Hot 100 in spring 1984?
Footloose
Footloose was co-written with the film's screenwriter, Dean Pitchford, who took the plot from Elmore City, Oklahoma, a real town whose old ban on dancing fell only when its high-school students asked to hold a prom.
Q 23Kenny Loggins's run of soundtrack hits began with 'I'm Alright' from which film?
Caddyshack
Peg carries McDonald's stacked harmonies; its guitar solo defeated a string of top session players before Jay Graydon spent about six hours getting a take Becker and Fagen would keep.
Q 14Which Toto song was the band's first and only Billboard Hot 100 number one?
Africa
'Africa' reached number one on the Hot 100 in February 1983, Toto's only chart-topper; 'Rosanna' had stalled at number two for five weeks but won Record of the Year.
Q 15Which Toto album won Album of the Year at the 1983 Grammys?
Toto IV
Toto IV won for a band of Los Angeles session players whom rock critics had largely dismissed, beating Donald Fagen's The Nightfly and Paul McCartney's Tug of War to the top album prize.
Q 16Toto's Grammy-winning 1982 hit borrowed the first name of which actress, then dating keyboardist Steve Porcaro?
Rosanna Arquette
Rosanna Arquette gave the song its name, yet its writer was not her boyfriend but bandmate David Paich, who has said the lyric draws on girls he had known years earlier.
Q 17Which Michael Jackson hit did Toto's Steve Porcaro co-write?
Human Nature
Human Nature reached Quincy Jones by accident: short of blank cassettes, Porcaro taped bandmate David Paich's song pitches on the back of his own rough demo, and Jones played the other side too.
Q 18Which Doobie Brothers hit came out before Michael McDonald joined the band?
Black Water
Black Water began as a B-side the label never saw as a single; a station in Roanoke, Virginia, put it in heavy rotation, others followed, and it reached number one in March 1975, shortly before McDonald arrived.
Q 19Michael McDonald's 'Yah Mo B There' won a Grammy as a duet with which singer?
James Ingram
James Ingram's duet with McDonald lived on as a punchline: in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, a salesman stuck beside a McDonald concert DVD in an electronics store threatens to burn the place down if he hears it once more.
Q 20Which 1994 rap hit is built on a sample of Michael McDonald's 'I Keep Forgettin''?
Regulate
'Regulate', Warren G and Nate Dogg's 1994 hit, is built on McDonald's 1982 single 'I Keep Forgettin''; Leiber and Stoller share McDonald's writing credit because it resembled their 1962 Chuck Jackson song.
Caddyshack ends with its gopher, unharmed after the groundskeeper dynamites the golf course to kill it, dancing to the song, which reached number seven in 1980 and features a guest vocal from Eddie Money.
Q 24Daryl Hall and John Oates first met in 1967 in which city?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia is where the pair first met as rivals rather than partners: each was leading his own vocal group on the same bill at a 1967 dance, and only afterwards did they find they were both Temple students.
Q 25Which Hall & Oates single stalled at number 60 on first release, then reached the top ten when reissued in 1976?
She's Gone
She's Gone was put out again by the duo's old label, Atlantic, only after they had left for RCA and scored with Sara Smile; the song that had flopped then climbed to number seven.
Q 26Which 1979 Rupert Holmes number one is better known by its bracketed subtitle, The Piña Colada Song?
Escape
Escape topped the chart in December 1979 and again in January 1980, and Holmes says the drink was a last-minute swap: his draft chorus named Humphrey Bogart until he decided he had used enough film references.
Q 27In Rupert Holmes's Piña Colada Song, where does the bored narrator find the woman's ad?
In the newspaper personals
In the newspaper personals, which he reads while his partner sleeps; he answers the ad, and the twist is that the woman who walks into the bar to meet him is that same partner, as restless as he was.
Q 28Session man Raphael Ravenscroft played the famous saxophone riff on which late-1970s hit?
Baker Street
Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty's 1978 single, earned Ravenscroft a reported £27 for the session, and the riff came to irritate him: in 2011 he said he could hear that his playing was slightly flat.
Q 29Gerry Rafferty had earlier co-founded which band, of 'Stuck in the Middle with You' fame?
Stealers Wheel
Stealers Wheel's hit began as a joke: Rafferty wrote it as a Bob Dylan parody mocking a music-industry cocktail party, and to the band's surprise it sold over a million copies and reached number six in America in 1973.
Q 30Boz Scaggs's 1976 breakthrough album Silk Degrees produced which two hit singles?
'Lowdown' and 'Lido Shuffle'
'Lowdown' and 'Lido Shuffle' were both co-written by the album's keyboard player, David Paich, who then formed Toto with its drummer, Jeff Porcaro, and bassist, David Hungate; 'Lowdown' reached number three.