TOP 40 DEBUT: November 24, 1979
PEAK POSITION: #11 (February 9, 1980)
Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald are yacht rock royalty. Theirs are the first faces you see in the first episode of the Yacht Rock web series, an episode entitled “What A Fool Believes” (a reference to the first song the two ever wrote together). “This Is It,” the second song the two ever wrote together, appears prominently in the second episode of Yacht Rock, an episode entitled “Keep The Fire” (a reference to Loggins’ 1979 album and single). Keep The Fire (the album) peaks with “This Is It,” the pair's Grammy-winning duet. “Keep The Fire” (the episode) peaks with Loggins and McDonald composing “This Is It” while shirtless around a campfire, before engaging in a knock-down brawl with Daryl Hall and John Oates. Oh, and then someone dies from a harpoon injury.
Yacht Rock, as you might’ve already guessed, isn’t a well-researched overview of the adult-oriented pop-rock that dominated airwaves between 1975 and 1984. It’s a cheaply made, often hilarious show where real-life musicians are portrayed by actors in fake mustaches and fright wigs. Its success added the phrase “yacht rock” to the lexicon, a term that now functions as both an actual genre signifier (defined by clean production, breezy melodies, and lots of white men playing electric piano) and a disparaging dismissal of the same. Every movement resents its name—punks hated the word “punk,” grunge bands fumed about being called “grunge”—but when your movement is retroactively assigned a label, twenty years after the fact, by a low-budget comedy series? You might have a legitimate gripe.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the punchline. “Yacht rock” kicked off a revival of the very genre it was meant to mock, introducing acts like Toto and Christopher Cross to a generation of listeners not even alive during the music’s original heyday. There are now “yacht rock” playlists on Spotify. There are “yacht rock” stations on SiriusXM. And in 2017, when Thundercat—a virtuoso musician and producer born exactly five years after the release of Keep The Fire—put out a track containing guest vocals from both McDonald and Loggins, it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt like a long-overdue reappraisal.
Look, if pop culture needed a silly web series to finally acknowledge the songwriting talent of Loggins & McDonald (and Becker & Fagen, and Hall & Oates, and so on), then so be it. But the whole concept of retrofitting an artist’s entire body of work down to one niche element? That’s a problem. Loggins logged two solid decades of consistent hitmaking; within that time frame, barely six of those years were spent making what we now call “yacht rock.” Those years don’t exist in a vacuum, and the rest of his career doesn’t fit into such an easy pigeonhole. Kenny Loggins moved from the gentlest children’s music to the loudest blockbuster soundtracks, soft rock to hard rock to everything in between. And somewhere in the middle he recorded “This Is It,” a song whose streamlined surface practically defines the entire “yacht” aesthetic even as its heavy subject matter threatens to blow up the whole marina.
Prior to writing “What A Fool Believes,” Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald had never met in person. But they’d been on each other’s radar for years. Loggins came to prominence as half of the successful folk-rock duo Loggins & Messina before launching a solo career with 1977’s Celebrate Me Home; McDonald joined the Doobie Brothers as a touring member in 1975 and was singing lead on the band’s very next single a year later. (“Takin’ It To The Streets” hit #13 in June 1976. McDonald wrote it himself, and it’s an 8.) Doobies bassist Tiran Porter, friends with both men, arranged the initial meeting at McDonald’s home in Studio City. As Loggins explained in a 2018 L.A. Times interview, they started collaborating before even laying eyes on each other.
“I was unpacking my guitar and the door to his house was open, and I heard him singing ideas around ‘What a Fool Believes.’ He [already] had that verse melody... Then he stopped where he had no more ideas, and my imagination kept going and I heard the B section in my head. So I knocked on the door and we shake hands and I go, ‘I think I know the next part of that song.’” The two men wrote the rest of the music that afternoon. The lyrics were finished over telephone the following day.
Loggins’ rendition of “What A Fool Believes” appeared in July 1978 on his second solo album, Nightwatch, but it wasn’t a single. Six months later, the Doobie Brothers released their own version to radio. “What A Fool Believes” hit #1 in April 1979, thanks in no small part to McDonald’s unforgettable vocal, going on to win Grammys for both Song and Record of the Year. (It’s a 9.) The song’s sophisticated, jazz-influenced chord structure and oddly “floppy feel” (to quote producer Ted Templeman) became the blueprint for the “West Coast sound” that would reshape soft-rock as the decades turned over. And its immediate, out-of-the-gate success nearly paralyzed its creators. “It took us a long time to get to writing a second song,” said Loggins in another interview, this time from Ultimate Classic Rock. “The unspoken feeling was that we were nervous about writing something that was up to the level of 'What a Fool Believes.’”
“This Is It” became that second song, and from the jump, it refuses to be an easy—or obvious—sequel. Minor chords dominate early on, the bright bounce of the Doobies’ smash replaced with ARP synthesizer squiggles and a late-night pulse closer to quiet-storm R&B. Loggins sings the verses in a featherweight quaver, holding back his full tenor (and McDonald’s syncopated piano line) until the last possible second. (The way both elements cut through all the polite production on the lyric “Are you gonna wait for a sign??” is a nice touch.) The chorus itself lands on a very unusual Db/Eb, which—for those without a music theory background—simply means that the straight-ahead rallying cry of “This is it!” is immediately tempered by the unsettled chord beneath. In every aspect, “This Is It” is a tougher sell than its Grammy-winning predecessor: less immediate, less hook-driven. But perhaps that’s by design. Strip away the polish, and there are depths in this track—if you know where to find them.
For the longest time, I wasn’t looking. Without knowing the backstory, I dismissed the song as too lightweight, too cloying, too trite by a half. In my defense, the lyrics easily scan like your average by-the-numbers love song: “There've been times in my life/ I've been wonderin' why/ Still, somehow I believed we'd always survive.” Initially, Loggins and McDonald approached the narrative the same way, trying out a variety of romantic clichés and wondering why the track refused to take flight. And then Kenny had an argument with his father.
Robert Loggins was about to give up. He’d been hospitalized for months, undergoing a series of surgeries designed to treat his ailing heart, and the process had ground him down emotionally. So on this particular hospital visit, Robert told his son his destiny was to die on the operating table. Words were exchanged. Voices were raised. And with emotions still running high, Kenny left the hospital and wrote these lines: “For once in your life, here’s your miracle/ Stand up and fight.” That emotion you hear in his voice? Anger, frustration… and also hope, a son willing his father to keep praying, and fighting, and living: “This is it/ Make no mistake where you are/ This is it/ You’re goin’ no further.”
Loggins and McDonald finished the rest of the lyrics that same day, and a composition they’d rewritten several times as a love song instantly transformed into (to use Kenny’s words) “a life song.” That collaboration extended to the recording process, where McDonald’s background vocals became a critical component in the eventual success of “This Is It.” (Strangely, he doesn’t get a “featuring” credit on the single proper, although he’s listed in the album credits under “Personnel.” Michael probably needed a better agent.) Pay special attention to how they divide up the song: McDonald uses a gentler falsetto and delivers the more philosophical lines (“No one can tell what the future holds/ Who makes the choice of how it goes?”), while Loggins goes full-throated and urgent on the chorus, singing like his life—or his dad’s—depends on it.
If you’re thinking that all this heavy subject matter seems at odds with the entire conceit of “yacht rock,” well… You’re right. That’s the downside of keeping the music buoyant and the lyrics purposely vague; the raw origins can’t help but be obscured. And as the years progressed, “This Is It” invariably slipped into the nebulous category of “all-purpose inspirational anthem,” championed by cancer survivors and professional sports teams in equal measure. But maybe that’s a good thing. “This Is It” is now that rare composition where context comes entirely from the listener. Place it on a retro summer playlist, and you’ll hear it one way. Find out your dad has a terminal illness, and it becomes a different song altogether.
Kenny Loggins returned to the hospital that night, where he played a just-completed version of “This Is It” for his father. Several days later, Robert Loggins underwent successful cardiovascular surgery. He lived long enough to see “This Is It” win the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance a year later. He lived long enough to see Kenny land his first #1 single three years after that. By the time the elder Loggins finally passed away, in June of 1985, his son would have three more Grammy nominations and an unbroken stretch of nine Top 40 hits. We’ll be talking about Robert’s kid on this site for years to come.
GRADE: 7/10
I WANT MY MTV: Here’s the vintage video for “This Is It.” So much dry ice, so much facial hair, so little Michael McDonald.
BONUS BITS: Legendary rapper Nas showed Puffy how to flip an Eighties sample the right way on “We Will Survive,” an album cut from his 1996 album I Am...
BONUS BONUS BITS: I might’ve gone a bit hard on Yacht Rock, which definitely comes from a place of genuine admiration (and a fair bit of ridicule). One of the creators, J.D. Rynzar, is apparently a huge McDonald fan. And Michael apparently loves the show. So watch Episode 1 (and Episodes 3-13, for that matter) with a clear conscience.