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f0rrestAll I could see was a bright white light. It blinded me, dominated my senses. There was a presence above, a presence unlike any I had ever felt before, and it was not an angelic presence or benign; it was malevolent, it was a malevolent presence. I could hear things, little movements, speech in sibilant tongues, “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins for some reason, the sound of a buzzsaw getting closer and closer, coming down on my head, about to tear through my skull. I started panicking a little bit, thinking: where am I? How did I get here? Am I dead? Am I asleep? Was I abducted? Who abducted me? The buzz was getting louder. The bright white was starting to fade. I could see outlines. Was it aliens? Am I in the mothership right now? Are they going to probe me? I started squirming, unable to get up, like my body was weighed down by some sort of heinous gravity, or I was on serious narcotics or something. I started thinking, is this it? Is this how it ends? Did a serial killer whack me on the back of the head and drag me off to his basement? A serial killer who enjoys listening to 80s soft rock as he cuts open his victims? Was I about to be a statistic, a headline on the nightly news? “Man found dismembered, stuffed in refrigerator. Suspect still at large.” I was really freaking out now, squirming and sweating something fierce, and the buzzing was only getting louder, filling my head until it felt like it was coming from my own skull. Slowly, the bright white faded entirely, leaving only those sunspot afterimages, and when my vision cleared, that’s when I saw it: a figure hovering above me, only vaguely human. Malevolent. The lower half of its huge head was all white for some reason, and it had these bulging black eyes, as if they were magnified ten times beyond their normal size somehow. That’s when I realized this was no alien, no serial killer, this was something much, much worse.
This was the fucking dentist.
I was at the dentist. I never go to the dentist. I hate going to the dentist. But there I was, at the dentist, because my wife had guilt-tripped me into going: “A tooth infection can spread to your brain, you know, which can kill you, you know, and we have two kids, you know, and I can’t support this family on a single income, you know,” and so on. So I went to the fucking dentist for the first time in over ten years. And, on that first trip to the dentist, they did a cleaning and told me that my back left molar was decayed to hell, beyond repair pretty much, and that it needed to be pulled as soon as possible, but everything else seemed fine.
And I figured, for ten years not going to the dentist, having only one fucked up tooth was a good score, especially since I both smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, and when I drink coffee I often swish the stuff around in my mouth for a while, which I imagine would cause some enamel problems, at least long-term, like staining or decay, which I guess it did, considering I needed to get a tooth pulled. But still, only one? I guess I’m immune to the normal mortal consequences of not taking care of oneself, or maybe I have a high innate resistance, good stats, high CON, albeit low WIL, STR, CHR, and arguably INT.
So after that first cleaning, the woman behind the counter is all like, “OK, let’s get your extraction scheduled, when’s good for you in the next two weeks?” And I’m all like, look ma’am, I am not doing that, that’s going to fucking hurt, so I’m like, “I’ll need to check my schedule and get back with you.” So I pay and get the hell out of there, scheduling no follow-up and never planning to. When I get home, my wife finds the paper, which says “bad tooth, get it pulled, asap,” and I’m like, “I’ll call them back to schedule it,” but of course I never do, so about a month passes and my wife goes ahead and schedules it for me, which annoys me at first, because, one, I didn’t ask, and two, you can’t smoke or drink out of a straw after getting a tooth pulled, otherwise you run the risk of dry socket, which is when the blood clot over the hole doesn’t form properly, thus leaving exposed bone and nerve endings, which supposedly is one of the worst pains a human being can experience, or so I’ve heard, and hell no, I don’t want that. But then I think maybe they will give me some nice pain medication, and maybe I can take a day off work, and maybe I can use the post-extraction period to stop smoking cigarettes, since I will have strong motivation not to smoke during that period, because lord knows I don’t want dry socket. So I start to think, hey, maybe this won’t be so bad.
The appointment comes around. I’m leaning back in the dental chair. There is 80s soft rock playing. The room is mostly white. There’s white wallpaper and there’s white equipment and the chairs are white and all the people coming in and out of the room are white. The oral nurse, or whatever they’re called, she’s a woman. I’ve never had one not be a woman. She leans me back, checks inside my mouth with mirrors, nods and smiles, and says, “OK, the doctor will be right in. How are you doing today?” And I’m like, “Fine,” but I want to say, “How do you think? I’m at the fucking dentist.” I smile and nod, and I think about sex because I always think about sex when a woman is laying me down on a fucking table and getting real close to my mouth. I can’t help it. My mind always wanders to like, “Is she going to kiss me? Are we going to start taking our clothes off right now?” and how interesting and exciting that would be. I’m not even aroused or anything, I’m just thinking it, saying stuff like “Fine” and nodding and acting like I’m not thinking about anything at all, when of course I’m thinking about sex. She’s buxom and dark-haired and pale and maybe around my age, and she says, “OK, sweetie, well sit tight, the doctor will be right in.” So I sit tight. I observe the room. There are oil paintings of ships and egrets on the walls. It is very nautical for some reason. I start thinking that maybe the dentist here thinks he’s some sort of ship captain or something, like he’s navigating the perilous waters of plaque and decay, or maybe he’s like Ahab and teeth are his Moby Dick. Maybe something real bad involving teeth happened to him in high school or something. Maybe some bully made fun of his teeth, and maybe he’s been on a revenge path ever since. Maybe he derives sick pleasure from yanking teeth out of skulls with metal pliers, watching blood pool up in his patients’ mouths as he jerks his hand back and forth, ripping and tearing the tooth out of the gum. Or maybe he just likes ocean stuff, who knows. Maybe he thinks the sea is calming. Maybe he thinks pictures of the ocean and birds and boats will calm his patients, make them forget that they’re at one of the worst places on Earth: the dentist’s office. Maybe he thinks of himself as doing a service that no one else wants to do, “If not I, who? Who will scrape the plaque, who will banish the decay?” Maybe he thinks of himself as some sort of superhero or something.
The guy who walks into the room is this short, muscular bald man with a trimmed red beard poking out around his white facial mask. He wears nerdy glasses but looks serious about working out every day, like he’s got a routine or something. He says, “Forrest? Nice to meet you. Don’t worry. This won’t hurt a bit.” And I of course say, “What made you want to become a dentist?” And he looks down at me, eyebrow raised, not answering the question. So I add, “Just wondering.” And he says, “Well, my dad was a dentist, this was actually his practice for a while.” And that makes sense, I guess, so I just nod and say, “Is it really not going to hurt? I’ve never had this done before.” And he says, “Not with this, it won’t.” Then he puts this thing over my mouth, and within like five minutes I’m loopy as hell, barely able to keep my eyes open, which is when I have the little alien-abduction episode. Then the attractive nurse comes back, helps keep my mouth open, and the dentist sticks these needles into my gums, which pinch a little bit. It’s at this point that I realize that I have ceded control of my body to random people simply because they took out a lease on a building and stuck a diploma on its walls, and then I start thinking about that one episode of Seinfeld where Jerry suspects that his dentist did naughty stuff to him while he was under because he woke up with his pants unzipped, but I’m too zonked out at this point to analyze or care about this stuff too much. And then before you know it, the dentist has these thick metal pliers or something in my mouth, and I feel this pulling and tugging, this pressure inside there, but there’s no pain whatsoever, and the pressure persists for a while, I’m talking like fifteen minutes. Yacht rock is going through one ear and out the other while they are doing this to me. The tugging and the pressure go on for another minute before the dentist stops, wipes sweat off his brow, and says, “This is the most stubborn tooth I have ever worked with. That’s one good bone you got in there.” And then he takes a different utensil, a bladed one, sticks it in my mouth, and I assume uses it to cut the gums around my hard-headed tooth, to help with extracting it, I guess. Then he starts tugging and pulling it again. I feel no pain but taste lots of blood. Sometimes I tense up at the tugging and the pressure, but then I tell myself, “There is no pain, this will be over soon, relax, relax, relax, calm down calm down, look at the birds,” and so I look at the birds. The dentist keeps going for a while, tugging at the stubborn bone. But then Steve Winwood’s “While You See a Chance” starts playing, opening with one of my favorite synth lines in any song ever, at which point the dentist stops, wipes his brow, and literally says verbatim, “There we go, got a little Winwood going, we’re good now,” and then he goes back to yanking and tugging and pulling while I’m pretend-playing the keyboard on my leg to Winwood. Toward the end of the song, I start to hear this terrible snapping and crunching noise, and then, just like that, pop, out goes the tooth.
“Do you want to see it?” is what he says to me. So I look at the tooth and immediately see why it needed to come out: the whole below-gum portion of it was black with rot. I shudder a little bit, then lean back in the chair. He writes me a prescription for Tylenol-3, which contains codeine, which is a pretty hard narcotic, a natural opiate derived from the opium poppy, used as a pain reliever and cough suppressant, and then he tells me it will be ready in an hour at the local CVS, and that’s it. I leave the ocean room with a gaping hole in my mouth, pay, and get out of there. Then I go to Winn-Dixie, buy some ice cream, and then finally I go to CVS and pick up my drugs.
It’s been almost three days. There is still a gaping hole in my mouth, but I believe the blood clot has formed properly. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since the operation, and I don’t plan on smoking another one any time soon. While you see a chance, take it. I could smell winter on the wind, the milky sweetness of my son’s skin, the hearty aroma of bread cooking in the oven. It had been a long time. I had forgotten. The first day without nicotine, everything and everyone was frustrating to me, but I pushed through it. I kept telling myself, “I have done this before, I have quit cold turkey before, it is all mind over matter, I have free will, control, I am not just my biology, there is something more than blood and bone,” and that’s true: I did quit cold turkey before, without a medical excuse too. And of course, the codeine helped, made me care less, masked the withdrawal. Codeine is like a shortcut to a pleasant day. Like most opiates, it puts you in this easy-going, bubbly mood and makes you not give a shit about the things you normally would give a shit about, yet you still give a shit, if that makes any sense, and you don't feel stupid or anything like that, you’re still totally cognizant, not paralyzed. You can still do stuff. You're still functional. It’s just that the anxiety, the edge, is all gone. Nothing really matters, but you’re still going through the motions. It’s a nice, floaty feeling.
Now, on the dawn of the third day, the urge to smoke has passed, the pain is pretty much gone, but I am still popping these pills as if I’m in the worst pain of my life. I am abusing this codeine, which I think is fine, because it’s not every day you get legal access to hardcore narcotics. I told myself, “While you see a chance, take it. Thank you, Mr. Steve Winwood.” And besides, there are only like five pills left in my bottle of Tylenol-3, which means soon I will be forced to stop abusing the codeine, so no harm done, really. This happens every time I get prescribed pain medication; I go through a little cycle of abuse and addiction. I see the chance and I take it. It’s a temporary vice that doesn’t have many, if any, negative consequences, because there’s literally a hard stop, a point when I am forced to stop, because I run out of pills. It’s interesting because, obviously, consuming opiates when you don’t really need them is dangerous, but since there are only like 15 pills in the bottle, it’s not so dangerous that you’re hopelessly addicted to the stuff by the end of it, because, one, I haven’t consumed enough, and two, I can’t just get more, at least not easily. To get more, I’d have to lie about my pain, or I’d have to deal with sketchy drug dealers who might kill me, two things I’m not desperate enough to do, because I just haven’t taken enough codeine.
In a way, I’ve replaced my long-term addiction to nicotine, which has had a number of awful side effects like trouble sleeping, trouble waking up, smelling bad all the time, and having to take a break from whatever I’m doing every thirty minutes to smoke, and not to mention, it’s pretty expensive nowadays, with a short-term addiction to codeine that could barely even be called an addiction at all. So, I think this all works out for the better, is what I’m trying to say.
My opinion on the dentist hasn’t changed. I can’t stand going there. I probably won’t go for another few years. And yes, I know that’s very stupid. I know it's irresponsible. But I know myself, and I know how my mind works, and I know I am not going to the dentist for another few years. I just won’t. There are many things I am very childish about; going to the dentist is one of those things. Going to the dentist is not a pleasurable experience for me. I do not like ceding my body and my will to doctors. I do not like being under the preternatural white light. I do not like being teased by nurses. I do not like having needles poked into my gums. I do not like hearing terrible snapping and cracking noises coming from the inside of my mouth. I do not like the taste of blood for three days straight. I do not like the dentist.
But at least one good thing came out of it, I stopped smoking cigarettes. So if there’s a moral here, maybe it’s that even the worst things in the world, like going to the dentist, can have a silver lining. While you see a chance, take it, or something. I don't know. Maybe I’m just high on codeine.
This was the fucking dentist.
I was at the dentist. I never go to the dentist. I hate going to the dentist. But there I was, at the dentist, because my wife had guilt-tripped me into going: “A tooth infection can spread to your brain, you know, which can kill you, you know, and we have two kids, you know, and I can’t support this family on a single income, you know,” and so on. So I went to the fucking dentist for the first time in over ten years. And, on that first trip to the dentist, they did a cleaning and told me that my back left molar was decayed to hell, beyond repair pretty much, and that it needed to be pulled as soon as possible, but everything else seemed fine.
And I figured, for ten years not going to the dentist, having only one fucked up tooth was a good score, especially since I both smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, and when I drink coffee I often swish the stuff around in my mouth for a while, which I imagine would cause some enamel problems, at least long-term, like staining or decay, which I guess it did, considering I needed to get a tooth pulled. But still, only one? I guess I’m immune to the normal mortal consequences of not taking care of oneself, or maybe I have a high innate resistance, good stats, high CON, albeit low WIL, STR, CHR, and arguably INT.
So after that first cleaning, the woman behind the counter is all like, “OK, let’s get your extraction scheduled, when’s good for you in the next two weeks?” And I’m all like, look ma’am, I am not doing that, that’s going to fucking hurt, so I’m like, “I’ll need to check my schedule and get back with you.” So I pay and get the hell out of there, scheduling no follow-up and never planning to. When I get home, my wife finds the paper, which says “bad tooth, get it pulled, asap,” and I’m like, “I’ll call them back to schedule it,” but of course I never do, so about a month passes and my wife goes ahead and schedules it for me, which annoys me at first, because, one, I didn’t ask, and two, you can’t smoke or drink out of a straw after getting a tooth pulled, otherwise you run the risk of dry socket, which is when the blood clot over the hole doesn’t form properly, thus leaving exposed bone and nerve endings, which supposedly is one of the worst pains a human being can experience, or so I’ve heard, and hell no, I don’t want that. But then I think maybe they will give me some nice pain medication, and maybe I can take a day off work, and maybe I can use the post-extraction period to stop smoking cigarettes, since I will have strong motivation not to smoke during that period, because lord knows I don’t want dry socket. So I start to think, hey, maybe this won’t be so bad.
The appointment comes around. I’m leaning back in the dental chair. There is 80s soft rock playing. The room is mostly white. There’s white wallpaper and there’s white equipment and the chairs are white and all the people coming in and out of the room are white. The oral nurse, or whatever they’re called, she’s a woman. I’ve never had one not be a woman. She leans me back, checks inside my mouth with mirrors, nods and smiles, and says, “OK, the doctor will be right in. How are you doing today?” And I’m like, “Fine,” but I want to say, “How do you think? I’m at the fucking dentist.” I smile and nod, and I think about sex because I always think about sex when a woman is laying me down on a fucking table and getting real close to my mouth. I can’t help it. My mind always wanders to like, “Is she going to kiss me? Are we going to start taking our clothes off right now?” and how interesting and exciting that would be. I’m not even aroused or anything, I’m just thinking it, saying stuff like “Fine” and nodding and acting like I’m not thinking about anything at all, when of course I’m thinking about sex. She’s buxom and dark-haired and pale and maybe around my age, and she says, “OK, sweetie, well sit tight, the doctor will be right in.” So I sit tight. I observe the room. There are oil paintings of ships and egrets on the walls. It is very nautical for some reason. I start thinking that maybe the dentist here thinks he’s some sort of ship captain or something, like he’s navigating the perilous waters of plaque and decay, or maybe he’s like Ahab and teeth are his Moby Dick. Maybe something real bad involving teeth happened to him in high school or something. Maybe some bully made fun of his teeth, and maybe he’s been on a revenge path ever since. Maybe he derives sick pleasure from yanking teeth out of skulls with metal pliers, watching blood pool up in his patients’ mouths as he jerks his hand back and forth, ripping and tearing the tooth out of the gum. Or maybe he just likes ocean stuff, who knows. Maybe he thinks the sea is calming. Maybe he thinks pictures of the ocean and birds and boats will calm his patients, make them forget that they’re at one of the worst places on Earth: the dentist’s office. Maybe he thinks of himself as doing a service that no one else wants to do, “If not I, who? Who will scrape the plaque, who will banish the decay?” Maybe he thinks of himself as some sort of superhero or something.
The guy who walks into the room is this short, muscular bald man with a trimmed red beard poking out around his white facial mask. He wears nerdy glasses but looks serious about working out every day, like he’s got a routine or something. He says, “Forrest? Nice to meet you. Don’t worry. This won’t hurt a bit.” And I of course say, “What made you want to become a dentist?” And he looks down at me, eyebrow raised, not answering the question. So I add, “Just wondering.” And he says, “Well, my dad was a dentist, this was actually his practice for a while.” And that makes sense, I guess, so I just nod and say, “Is it really not going to hurt? I’ve never had this done before.” And he says, “Not with this, it won’t.” Then he puts this thing over my mouth, and within like five minutes I’m loopy as hell, barely able to keep my eyes open, which is when I have the little alien-abduction episode. Then the attractive nurse comes back, helps keep my mouth open, and the dentist sticks these needles into my gums, which pinch a little bit. It’s at this point that I realize that I have ceded control of my body to random people simply because they took out a lease on a building and stuck a diploma on its walls, and then I start thinking about that one episode of Seinfeld where Jerry suspects that his dentist did naughty stuff to him while he was under because he woke up with his pants unzipped, but I’m too zonked out at this point to analyze or care about this stuff too much. And then before you know it, the dentist has these thick metal pliers or something in my mouth, and I feel this pulling and tugging, this pressure inside there, but there’s no pain whatsoever, and the pressure persists for a while, I’m talking like fifteen minutes. Yacht rock is going through one ear and out the other while they are doing this to me. The tugging and the pressure go on for another minute before the dentist stops, wipes sweat off his brow, and says, “This is the most stubborn tooth I have ever worked with. That’s one good bone you got in there.” And then he takes a different utensil, a bladed one, sticks it in my mouth, and I assume uses it to cut the gums around my hard-headed tooth, to help with extracting it, I guess. Then he starts tugging and pulling it again. I feel no pain but taste lots of blood. Sometimes I tense up at the tugging and the pressure, but then I tell myself, “There is no pain, this will be over soon, relax, relax, relax, calm down calm down, look at the birds,” and so I look at the birds. The dentist keeps going for a while, tugging at the stubborn bone. But then Steve Winwood’s “While You See a Chance” starts playing, opening with one of my favorite synth lines in any song ever, at which point the dentist stops, wipes his brow, and literally says verbatim, “There we go, got a little Winwood going, we’re good now,” and then he goes back to yanking and tugging and pulling while I’m pretend-playing the keyboard on my leg to Winwood. Toward the end of the song, I start to hear this terrible snapping and crunching noise, and then, just like that, pop, out goes the tooth.
“Do you want to see it?” is what he says to me. So I look at the tooth and immediately see why it needed to come out: the whole below-gum portion of it was black with rot. I shudder a little bit, then lean back in the chair. He writes me a prescription for Tylenol-3, which contains codeine, which is a pretty hard narcotic, a natural opiate derived from the opium poppy, used as a pain reliever and cough suppressant, and then he tells me it will be ready in an hour at the local CVS, and that’s it. I leave the ocean room with a gaping hole in my mouth, pay, and get out of there. Then I go to Winn-Dixie, buy some ice cream, and then finally I go to CVS and pick up my drugs.
It’s been almost three days. There is still a gaping hole in my mouth, but I believe the blood clot has formed properly. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since the operation, and I don’t plan on smoking another one any time soon. While you see a chance, take it. I could smell winter on the wind, the milky sweetness of my son’s skin, the hearty aroma of bread cooking in the oven. It had been a long time. I had forgotten. The first day without nicotine, everything and everyone was frustrating to me, but I pushed through it. I kept telling myself, “I have done this before, I have quit cold turkey before, it is all mind over matter, I have free will, control, I am not just my biology, there is something more than blood and bone,” and that’s true: I did quit cold turkey before, without a medical excuse too. And of course, the codeine helped, made me care less, masked the withdrawal. Codeine is like a shortcut to a pleasant day. Like most opiates, it puts you in this easy-going, bubbly mood and makes you not give a shit about the things you normally would give a shit about, yet you still give a shit, if that makes any sense, and you don't feel stupid or anything like that, you’re still totally cognizant, not paralyzed. You can still do stuff. You're still functional. It’s just that the anxiety, the edge, is all gone. Nothing really matters, but you’re still going through the motions. It’s a nice, floaty feeling.
Now, on the dawn of the third day, the urge to smoke has passed, the pain is pretty much gone, but I am still popping these pills as if I’m in the worst pain of my life. I am abusing this codeine, which I think is fine, because it’s not every day you get legal access to hardcore narcotics. I told myself, “While you see a chance, take it. Thank you, Mr. Steve Winwood.” And besides, there are only like five pills left in my bottle of Tylenol-3, which means soon I will be forced to stop abusing the codeine, so no harm done, really. This happens every time I get prescribed pain medication; I go through a little cycle of abuse and addiction. I see the chance and I take it. It’s a temporary vice that doesn’t have many, if any, negative consequences, because there’s literally a hard stop, a point when I am forced to stop, because I run out of pills. It’s interesting because, obviously, consuming opiates when you don’t really need them is dangerous, but since there are only like 15 pills in the bottle, it’s not so dangerous that you’re hopelessly addicted to the stuff by the end of it, because, one, I haven’t consumed enough, and two, I can’t just get more, at least not easily. To get more, I’d have to lie about my pain, or I’d have to deal with sketchy drug dealers who might kill me, two things I’m not desperate enough to do, because I just haven’t taken enough codeine.
In a way, I’ve replaced my long-term addiction to nicotine, which has had a number of awful side effects like trouble sleeping, trouble waking up, smelling bad all the time, and having to take a break from whatever I’m doing every thirty minutes to smoke, and not to mention, it’s pretty expensive nowadays, with a short-term addiction to codeine that could barely even be called an addiction at all. So, I think this all works out for the better, is what I’m trying to say.
My opinion on the dentist hasn’t changed. I can’t stand going there. I probably won’t go for another few years. And yes, I know that’s very stupid. I know it's irresponsible. But I know myself, and I know how my mind works, and I know I am not going to the dentist for another few years. I just won’t. There are many things I am very childish about; going to the dentist is one of those things. Going to the dentist is not a pleasurable experience for me. I do not like ceding my body and my will to doctors. I do not like being under the preternatural white light. I do not like being teased by nurses. I do not like having needles poked into my gums. I do not like hearing terrible snapping and cracking noises coming from the inside of my mouth. I do not like the taste of blood for three days straight. I do not like the dentist.
But at least one good thing came out of it, I stopped smoking cigarettes. So if there’s a moral here, maybe it’s that even the worst things in the world, like going to the dentist, can have a silver lining. While you see a chance, take it, or something. I don't know. Maybe I’m just high on codeine.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 11:03 pm (UTC)Your storytelling is always just great! Steve Winwood as the linchpin, Steve Winwood as the gateway to legal opiates, Steve Winwood as the extra push that gets that dentist yanking out your recalcitrant tooth. Loved it.
Tangentially, I would love to know what constitutes yacht rock. Like I can sort of imagine? But could you give me three titles that might qualify? (Actually, I also have to listen to the Steve Winwood song, because I know his name but I don't actually know what songs belong with that name, and I don't know if I know this title.)
(Also, not ignoring your previous entry! I always work backward from the most recent entry. Also, I don't like to be rushed, so I need to have a good amount of time available to me to read it in.)
no subject
Date: 2026-02-01 12:46 am (UTC)A lot of 70s/80s soft rock borders on yacht rock, borrowing heavily from soul, funk, and jazz, but more like stealing over borrowing. It sounds very gentrified. It's more of an aesthetic than a truly unique type of music. And it's used mostly as a derogatory in music circles. Jazz musicians usually scoff at it. It's pretty much any music you'd hear playing from a white dude's yacht when you're walking through a marina or whatever. It usually has baritone vocals, keyboards, and some brass. It always follows the standard pop rules of like verse chorus verse chorus with some variation, but it is not experimental at all, it is not jazz, although it wants to be. Good rule of thumb, if Michael Mcdonald sings in a song, that song is almost always yacht rock. Yacht rock can sound really good and be really catchy, but there's usually something missing from it, something slightly empty. Many consider Steely Dan yacht rock, and Michael McDonald does indeed sing in a few Dan songs, but Steely Dan, while foundationally pop and jazzy, is too experimental and complex to fit the definition, and the members of Steely Dan hate the label, they even refused to be part of a "yacht rock" documentary, but a few of their songs are good examples of the "sound."
Here are a few songs that come to mind when I think "yacht rock" sound: 1) "What a Fool Believes," Doobie Brothers 2) "Steal Away," Robbie Dupree 3) "Hey Nineteen," Steely Dan
no subject
Date: 2026-02-01 12:58 am (UTC)Also I checked out the Steve Winwood song and I have heard it! I just didn't know it by name. I agree, that intro is catchy, though the song isn't one I'd ever seek out. (I mean I wouldn't run screaming out of the room either but it doesn't light my fires.)
no subject
Date: 2026-02-01 01:19 am (UTC)That Steven Winwood song plays all of its cards at the very beginning, by having that insanely good keyboard part first and foremost before everything else. The rest of the song is blah. His most popular song is called "Higher Love," which I think was in some Disney movie or other, so you've probably heard that one way more than the other. That song is worse than "Chance" though, at least in my opinion.
I'm learning that you and I have very different tastes in music, which is fine, but it does make me think about the fact that music is one of the best counterarguments to "objective quality." Songs that I think are really good and get caught in my head for literal months, other people will be like, "eh, this is all right" or in some cases "this is terrible." It's very interesting, I think.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-01 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-01 12:48 pm (UTC)Now, though, even though I do still feel a smidge regretful, it's not terrible because this other, for me very reassuring, feeling washes over me: that there are these thousand thousand ways of ... okay, I'm not sure exactly what I want to say next. Being human. Being creative. Speaking out (metaphorically) to the world. Loving. Resonating like a bell. Not just one or two or three or ten. So before I would have said, "Yeah, it's fine that we have different tastes," but I'd have this disappointment, because of how much I love [please don't flip out] your writing. But now I'm like, it really is okay! It makes me feel at ease in a profound way that the transcendental noise that moves people is maybe as diverse as the types of flowers or beetles or whatever that there are in this world.
Plus, to back away from the sublime and back to the mundane, I still do think that a lot of the music you show me is going to be stuff where I find things I love, even if they're not precisely your things you love, and it's going to be music I wouldn't have found otherwise--like Autocamper. And that's lucky for me, heh.
My music, yeah, I don't think you'll find much because while I think I love broadly across genres, I think fundamentally I'm extremely basic, so what I'm liking is very basic (just across lots of genres). And I think you're more musically sophisticated than that. (This is not shameless flattery; this is me owning up to a truth about myself. Most people I know are more sophisticated, musically, than I am.)