Yacht Rock Revue Turns a Childhood Dream Into a Long, Smooth Night at Ruoff

On a late-summer Saturday in Noblesville, Yacht Rock Revue did what it has spent nearly two decades learning how to do well: take the polished soft-rock hits of the late 1970s and early 1980s and play them with the care of a working band, not a costume act. The Atlanta group’s Primetime tour stop at Ruoff Music Center on September 12, 2026, ran like a radio station that refused to go to commercial. Songs spilled into one another. Talk stayed scarce. The crowd stayed on its feet.

That approach is what still sets the band apart. Plenty of acts borrow the “yacht rock” label. Few treat Steely Dan voicings, Hall & Oates harmonies, and Michael McDonald grooves as music that has to be played correctly. Rolling Stone has called Yacht Rock Revue the “world’s premier soft-rock party band,” and Saturday’s headline set made the point without a sales pitch. It was a long show, built for people who came to sing.

From Columbus Indiana Classrooms to a National Circuit

The Indiana thread in this band is not a marketing line. Lead singer Nicholas Niespodziani and fellow lead vocalist Peter Olson met in fourth grade at W.D. Richards Elementary in Columbus, Indiana. They played in high school bands, then kept going at Indiana University before moving to Atlanta with the indie group Y-O-U. In 2007, a tongue-in-cheek night of soft-rock covers at an Atlanta club residency drew a crowd that wanted the joke repeated. The joke became the job.

Yacht Rock Revue grew from that weekly residency into a national touring act with a Live Nation relationship and a fan base that calls itself the Anchorheads. The group has shared stages with John Oates, the late Eddie Money, both versions of Player, Robbie Dupree, Elliot Lurie, and Matthew Wilder. In 2023 the band opened Kenny Loggins’ “This Is It” tour. In 2024 it spent the summer on a 44-city run with Train and REO Speedwagon, including an opening slot at this same Noblesville amphitheater.

Original music followed the covers. The first original album, Hot Dads In Tight Jeans, arrived in 2020 after the single “Step.” The 21-track concept album Escape Artist followed in late 2024. The band has also been the subject of national press in The New York Times and a PBS special. The current ten-piece lineup still includes six members from the early years. In recent seasons fans have seen a larger vocal front line, with Keisha Jackson joining in 2014 and her daughter Kourtney coming aboard a couple of years later, plus a two-drummer setup with Jason Nackers and Ganesh Giri Jaya after earlier years with founding drummer Mark Cobb.

For Niespodziani, Ruoff was never just another date. He has said he still thinks of the place as Deer Creek, the venue where he saw Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Lenny Kravitz, and other shows that stuck with him as a kid from Columbus. Before the 2024 opening slot he called playing the amphitheater “a childhood dream coming true.” Olson grew up in the same town and has carried lead vocals with him since those school years. Saturday’s headline booking, on the Coors Light Concert Series, was the night they had been aiming at for a long time: not a support slot, and not a parking-lot show like the 2020 drive-in date west of the pavilion, but the main stage.

A Long Set With Almost No Pause

The band took the stage at 8:10 p.m. and played until about 10:30. There was very little banter. Most songs ended by running straight into the next one, which made the night feel even longer than the clock suggested. The total was probably more than 40 songs. After a while it became hard to keep a clean count, which seemed to be the idea.

The Primetime production is built around the golden age of television as much as FM radio, and that showed up in the familiar tour framework: a Love Boat opening, bursts of old theme music, and a stretch the band has been calling the campfire jam. Around those frames came the catalog people came to hear — Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross, the Doobie Brothers, America, Little River Band, Rupert Holmes, Boz Scaggs, and Hall & Oates among them. The playing stayed tight. David B. Freeman’s sax and flute lines gave the arrangements their studio-era sheen. The two drummers kept the midtempo songs from sagging. Olson and Niespodziani split the lead load the way they have since they were kids, trading verses instead of turning the night into a single-frontman showcase.

The moment that cut through the medleys was Kourtney Jackson’s reading of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” Parton died on August 25, 2026, in Nashville at age 80, and the song has been turning up on the band’s late-summer setlists. Jackson did not treat it as a novelty. She sang it with lift and bite, and the amphitheater answered like a room that still knew every word. It was an homage that earned its place in a yacht-rock set because the band played it as a hit, not a eulogy speech.

Band Members

• Nicholas Niespodziani – vocals, guitars, keyboards, percussion
• Peter Olson – vocals, guitars, keyboards, percussion
• Greg Lee – bass, vocals
• Mark Dannells – guitars, vocals
• Mark Bencuya – keyboards, vocals
• David B. Freeman – saxophones, keyboards, flute, piccolo, percussion, vocals
• Keisha Jackson – vocals, percussion (Not present for this show)
• Kourtney Jackson – vocals, percussion
• Jason Nackers – drums
• Ganesh Giri Jaya – drums (Not present for this show)

Setlist Note

No verified public setlist for the September 12 Ruoff show had been posted at the time of this writing. The list below is a most likely setlist, drawn from the band’s Primetime dates immediately around this stop, including the September 11 show at Chicago’s Salt Shed. Song order at Ruoff may have shifted, and the overlapping transitions made the night feel longer than any printed list. Even though I had a “plus one” reviewer, we simply lost track.

• Love Boat Theme (Jack Jones)
• Heart to Heart (Kenny Loggins)
• Take a Chance on Me / Love Will Keep Us Together
• Kiss on My List (Hall & Oates)
• My Old School (Steely Dan)
• Steal Away (Robbie Dupree)
• Somebody’s Baby (Jackson Browne)
• That’s All (Genesis)
• I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near) (Michael McDonald)
• Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) (Looking Glass)
• Tropical Illusion
• Africa (Toto)
• Everywhere (Fleetwood Mac)
• Still the One / Dream Weaver
• Magic (Olivia Newton-John)
• Ride Like the Wind (Christopher Cross)
• Black Cow (Steely Dan)
• Takin’ It to the Streets (The Doobie Brothers)
• Brady Bunch Theme / Laverne & Shirley Theme / Magnum, P.I. Theme
• Summer Breeze (Seals & Crofts)
• A Horse With No Name (America)
• I’d Really Love to See You Tonight (England Dan & John Ford Coley)
• Afternoon Delight (Starland Vocal Band)
• Sister Golden Hair (America)
• Cool Change (Little River Band)
• Escape (The Piña Colada Song) (Rupert Holmes)
• 9 to 5 (Dolly Parton)
• I’m Still Standing (Elton John)
• Danger Zone (Kenny Loggins)
• Heart & Soul (Huey Lewis and the News)
• (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life
• Lido Shuffle (Boz Scaggs)
• She’s Gone (Hall & Oates)
• Never Too Much (Luther Vandross)
• Baker Street (Gerry Rafferty)
• Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) (Journey)
• Top Gun Anthem (Harold Faltermeyer)

The Room Still Known as Deer Creek

Ruoff Music Center remains one of the easiest big rooms in the Midwest to enjoy on a September night. Sunshine Promotions opened it in 1989 as Deer Creek Music Center. Sandi Patty played the first show that May. The Grateful Dead notched the first sellout two months later and returned often enough to stamp the place on the national map. The names changed with the sponsors — Verizon Wireless, Klipsch, Ruoff Home Mortgage, then Ruoff — but a lot of Indiana concertgoers never stopped saying Deer Creek. Capacity sits near 24,800, with the pavilion up front and the lawn climbing the hill. Pollstar has ranked it among the world’s top amphitheaters for tickets sold. For a band whose two singers grew up an hour south in Columbus, the lawn lights and the familiar bowl still carry a different kind of weight.

What the Night Left Behind

The value of this show was stamina and craft. Yacht Rock Revue did not stop to explain the music. It just kept serving another chorus, then another, until 10:30 arrived and the last groove finally gave out. If you like these records in the car, the live version is sturdier than nostalgia radio. The band plays the songs in tune, in time, and at a pace that leaves room for the crowd to do the work of remembering.

Seeing them on this tour is a straightforward recommendation. Expect a long set, stacked vocals, and very little chatter. Expect Kourtney Jackson to take a song and make the pavilion lean forward. And at Ruoff, expect a hometown-adjacent night that meant more to the two kids from Columbus than the production notes could show.

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