One last brimful glass of a buttery chardonnay. Pinky dipped for the dog to lick. Eternal boat ride back to the dock. Taking the governor off to beat the dark. ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales’ cranked on the cassette deck. Between the outboard motor and the music you can't hear a word coming out of your family's mouths. As close to True Salvation as most of us will ever get. Just right seasick. Just right blissed. Just another Memorial Day Weekend well spent in the Ever-Expanding Bosom of God. You have achieved Pontoon Spiritual, an awe inspiring and all-too-slippery human experience.
Pontoon Spiritual is a particular breed of early-to-mid 90s Adult Contemporary that has been widely celebrated but heretofore unnamed as its own aesthetic. Not as coked-out and randy as yacht rock. Strangely, it’s lighter than lite-rock when weighed against a feather on the scale of the Egyptian gods. It’s certainly not as mashed out on the assembly line floor of The Hit Factory as adult contempo royalty like John Secada or Amy Grant (who both rule, by the way). Often, Pontoon Spiritual will use Celtic pipes, New Wave quirk, African rhythms, Latin flair, Indian woodwinds or a triumphant Gospel choir — and sometimes all of the above all at once — to achieve its worldly and world-weary grandeur. A great many chimes and triangles and bongos. But also sometimes none of these elements. Pontoon Spiritual is, to crib from Justice Potter Stewart, like pornography: You know it when you see it. An awestruck bittersweet release. An aw-shucks sneaky plea for one last piece. Stoically clipping the tether on your midlife crisis and using it to tie up your ponytail. A couple old fashioneds deep and engaged in a staring competition with the skinny concrete Buddha garden statue in your step-mom's landscaping wrapped in a US flag. And damn don't these songs just go down so smooth with a Coors Banquet. Often, these are 90s albums made by some of the 1970s rock stars (Peter Gabriel, Don Henley, Bonnie Raitt, Zevon). Rather often, one of these Pontoon Spirituals is produced by a certain Daniel Lanois, who we suppose is one of the pillars of this family. Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ and ‘Riddim of the Saints’ are textbook listening for a Pontoon Spiritual scholar.
Our 2022 playlist, simply titled 'Pontoon Spiritual,' featured some of the power players of the genre. All the folks mentioned above; some other legends like Leo Kottke, Natalie Merchant and Leon Russell; but also some new celebrated blood like Big Red Machine and Big Thief. On our latest Pontoon Spiritual mix, we’ve used our trade secrets to identify Pontoon Spiritual classics toiling away in the dregs of DSPs. There are no one-for-one’s here. But you can certainly hear Merchant or Sarah McLachlan’s DNA in the water-ripple, operatic folk songs of De’Borah and Rebecca Blanks. And you can hear the aww-shucks mobile home Shakespeare of Chuck Prophet and Chris Smither in the storytelling of songwriters Byron Boo Fuller, Craig Carothers and Eric Stewart. We also have artists pushing at the edges of what is possible in Pontoon Spiritual. Raun MacKinnon Burnham’s “The Dog Song (Rough Mix)” delivers a goofier and ultimately more daring tribute to our canine pontoon companions than Simon’s “Mother And Child Reunion.” ‘Lake Toe: A Pontoon Spiritual’ has steel drums both analog and synthetic. Coconut sunscreen hummus on a hot wet tortilla chip given out in some perverse maritime communion. Pontoon Spiritual has been the inflatable swan around our neck for too long. And at the precipice of this long weekend, we share it with you. Permission to come aboard.
Editor’s Note: We also tossed in a Walter Becker solo joint to close this baby out. Obviously, his global acclaim far exceeds the near-zero fandom of these heretofore undiscovered Pontoon Spiritual artists. We were on a pontoon the day he died in 2017 — sucking down a comically large margarita no less. And so Walter's brilliant, fried and underloved album was on our minds as we cobbled this playlist together.