“I played something on the piano but it wasn’t killing any of us. So Kenny came over to me, holding his guitar, and said, ‘I think you should let Mike play the keyboard’”: Charlie Puth on making “yacht rock in 2026” with Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins

Having previously tapped-up smooth jazz legend Kenny G for a guest appearance on recent single, Cry, Charlie Puth has now gone full yacht rock and released a song with two of the genre’s (if indeed it is a genre) most iconic figures.

We’re talking, of course, about Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, the two men who wrote what is perhaps the most quintessentially yacht rock song of them all: What a Fool Believes. This was recorded both by the Doobie Brothers (with McDonald on lead vocals) and Loggins himself.

Discussing the collaboration, Puth has now told Vulture: “I knew I wanted to make a song that was so yacht rock in 2026. So how am I going to make that and not put the guys who invented the genre on the song with me?”

This meeting of MOR minds was arranged first by the artists’ managers, and then by Puth himself, who texted McDonald and Loggins – who also guested together on Thundercat's 2017 song, Show You The Way – and gave them examples of the kind of thing he had in mind. Puth says that he then became friends with McDonald, meeting him for coffee in the Santa Barbara area, where both (and Loggins, for that matter) are based.

And then the moment came when all three men got together in the studio. It was Loggins who came up with the title, Love in Exile, but this was before a note had been written.

“Kenny said he wanted to reverse engineer the song, so I had to ask, ‘What does that mean?’” Puth recalls. “And he said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re gonna figure it out as we go.’”

Armed with this insight and (lack of) direction, Puth says he attempted to make a start, but was quickly stopped in his tracks.

“I went to the piano and started playing something that was cool, but it wasn’t killing any of us,” he says. “It wasn’t making us feel anything. So Kenny came over to me, holding his guitar, and said, ‘I think you should let Mike play the keyboard.’”

It would have been easy for Puth to take this as some kind of slight, but he says that he was more than happy to defer to McDonald.

“I’m like, ‘Absolutely.’ I was scared to ask.”

Charlie Puth - Love In Exile (feat. Michael McDonald & Kenny Loggins) [Official Visualizer] - YouTube

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After that, it sounds like things moved on apace (“Once I felt it was like a shuffle, I heard the whole thing in my head,” says Puth). Piano parts were chopped up and laid over a temporary drum track so that the rest of the song could be written.

Listening to Puth’s new album, Whatever’s Clever, you can hear how artists such as Loggins and McDonald have influenced him, so we’re not surprised that he wanted to work with them.

McDonald gives the impression that it was very much a two-way thing, though – he was keen to collaborate with Puth, too – and he seems happy to embrace his position as yacht rock’s elder statesman.

“I was introduced to the term yacht rock when it was meant to be pathetic-comic humor,” he says. “But I remember telling my son, ‘Don’t laugh. Someday when your music becomes less relevant, your pathetic-comic value may come in handy.’”

McDonald also says that when he considers the musical quality of some of the other artists that he’s lumped in with – the likes of Steely Dan, the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers, and Hall & Oates – he’s more than happy to take the yacht rock label as a badge of honour.

“I stop and go, ‘I can’t think of a group I’d be prouder to be a part of,’” he says.