FEATURE:
Good King Walter, Good King Don
ART CREDIT: Mike Scott
The Uniqueness and Contemporary Relevance of Steely Dan
_________
THIS will be the final time…
IN THIS IMAGE: Donald Fagen/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
I mention Steely Dan for a while. There are a couple of reasons why they are back in my mind. For one, their second studio album, Countdown to Ecstasy, turns fifty next month (though I am not sure of the exact date). It is one of their absolute best. I am also still reading the excellent new book, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, from writer Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay. It is wonderfully written and illustrated book that dives deep into the songs of Steely Dan. It occurs, the more I read, the fewer comparable artists to Steely Dan there are. I know others have been inspired by them, but when you consider the artists who have ‘followed them’ – Prefab Sprout, Deacon Blue, Everything But the Girl -, nobody jumps out of the list where you can see and feel that direct inspiration! Maybe it is the unique talents of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen that results in this sense of music preservation and protection – that nobody can ever really get their sound and reach their giddy height. There is definitely a ‘Danaissance’ happening right now! With the book release helping to reignite chat about the band, I wonder why there are few artists trying to replicate and reproduce the essence of Steely Dan. Maybe it is too much studio work and perfectionism. The music of Steely Dan is so rich and honed, you wonder whether it is hard to get that sort of brilliance through mortal measure! Whether Steely Dan are very much one of a kind. I don’t think the lack of similar-sounding artists is because Steely Dan are uncool or not known enough.
It is true their music is not played in the U.K. enough. Like so many artists, when they are played on the radio here, you often get the same few songs played – the ones that are pretty well known (Dirty Work, Hey Nineteen etc.), rather than the deep cuts. I am going to come on to some personal thoughts about Steely Dan and why their music is so inspiring. First, it is worth pulling in some recent articles about them. You can buy Steely Dan’s albums on vinyl but, until recently, it has been very hard to do. You would have to ferret around on auction sites and get expensive second-hand copies. Fortunately with their debut Can’t Buy a Thrill, and the Countdown to Ecstasy follow-up committed to vinyl, the supreme – and in my view, best of their albums – Pretzel Logic is soon on vinyl. On 28th July, in fact. Here are more details:
“Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic is to be the next album in Geffen/UMe’s extensive, high fidelity audo reissue program of the band’s classic records from their ABC and MCA Records years. First released in 1974, their third LP contained one of their best-known hits, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” and will be reissued on July 28.
The series sees the seminal group’s first seven albums returning to vinyl, in most cases for the first time since their original release. Pretzel Logic follows the launch of the program last November with Steely Dan’s debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, followed this May by its 1973 follow-up, Countdown To Ecstasy.
Pretzel Logic has been meticulously remastered for the new edition by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes, and will be pressed on 180 gram black vinyl at 33 1/3 rpm. The album will also be available as a limited edition premium 45 rpm version on Ultra High-Quality Vinyl (UHQR) from Analogue Productions, which is the audiophile in-house reissue label of Acoustic Sounds. Analogue Productions is also releasing the Steely Dan series on Super Audio CD (SACD).
The third album by the tastemaking and groundbreaking band became their most successful to date on its first release, climbing to No.8 on the Billboard bestsellers in a 36-week chart stay. Pretzel Logic, which also featured such favorites as “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” and “Barrytown,” was certified gold in the US by the RIAA in May 1974, just three months after release, and went on to achieve platinum status in 1993. “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” the lead single, reached No.4, their highest-ever placing on the Billboard Hot 100.
The 45 RPM UHQR versions of the catalog will be pressed at Analogue Productions’ Quality Record Pressings on 200-gram Clarity Vinyl. They‘ll each be packaged in a deluxe box with a booklet detailing the entire process of making a UHQR disc, plus a certificate of inspection. Each UHQR is pressed, using hand-selected vinyl, with attention paid to every single detail of every single record.
Over the next year, the remaining albums from Steely Dan’s esteemed years on ABC and MCA (1975’s Katy Lied, 1976‘s The Royal Scam, 1977’s Aja and 1980’s Gaucho) will be given similar deluxe reissue treatment”.
Steely Dan are very much back in the spotlight right now. I have been inspired, a minor wannabe songwriter me, to think more in a ‘Dan’ way. At a time when so many important issues are not covered extensively in music – the L.G.B.T.QI.A.+ community, transgender rights, the environment, political corruption, and abortion rights, current affairs like the writer’s strike in the U.S… -, you want a new generation Steely Dan to bring out an album. I have been imagining song titles – Local Celebrity, Katy’s Switch , Can’t Buy a Thrill (a nod to the Steely Dan album of the same name: it is a (composition very much inspired by both Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, and Bernard Hermann’s Farewell and the Tower, from score for Vertigo) shame they did not write title tracks for Can’t Buy a Thrill and Countdown to Ecstasy) – and thinking about how all this new Steely Dan conversation and exposure will inspire musicians. As this article highlights, Donald Fagen and the late great Walter Becker’s (we lost him in 2017) music is having a renaissance at the moment:
“Steely Dan are having a moment. The 1970s jazz-rock duo are the subjects of a new book, as well as increasingly popular social media accounts such as “Good Steely Dan Takes” and “People Dancing to Steely Dan”, which now number tens of thousands of followers.
As with Fleetwood Mac before them, TikTok has introduced the band to a whole new generation of fans, who seem to care less about the aesthetic concerns that had until recently restrained the hipster music press from praising them. In 2000 the music publication Pitchfork gave the band’s comeback album, Two Against Nature, a score of 1.6 out of 10; it has now published retrospective reviews of the band’s most esteemed studio albums, with all of them rated 8.3 or higher.
If one is left to wonder how taste-making music journalists could have ever been so sniffy about tunes that blend bossa nova, jazz, and soul, then it is worth considering the fundamental conservatism of their lyrics.
For while the music of Steely Dan might have been revolutionary, their lyrics were ultimately jaded and cynical. Having previously been beatniks, the band’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker became pop’s first postliberals, with their most celebrated songs railing against the progressive excesses and naïve dreams of the 1960s and ’70s.
Their first album was released in 1972, with their early hit “Only a Fool Would Say That” alleged to be a riposte to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, which had been released the previous year. It criticised the hypocrisy of a man in a multimillion-dollar penthouse apartment singing about a world without possessions — I heard it was you/ Talking ’bout a world where all is free/ It just couldn’t be/ And only a fool would say that — and supposedly invited Lennon to consider what the ordinary working man would think of his message:
The man in the street dragging his feet/ Don’t wanna hear the bad news/ Imagine your face there in his place/ Standing inside his brown shoes/ You do his nine to five/ Drag yourself home half alive/ And there on the screen/ A man with a dream?
While Steely Dan songs are often about drugs or sex, and in some cases both, they nonetheless contain a critical awareness of the ultimate nihilism of this lifestyle. According to Alex Pappademas, one of the authors of the recent book, Dan lyrics are often “about people who can’t help driving headlong toward one form of destruction or another […] even when they know the truth” of what they’re doing.
Their 1976 song “Kid Charlemagne” — familiar to most under-40s from the Kanye West sample — was written about LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley. But after paying homage to his exploits in 1960s San Francisco, they lament that he was ultimately a failure.
Son, you were mistaken/ You are obsolete/ Look at all the white men on the street refers to the displacement of hallucinogens by cocaine. As Steely Dan knew in 1976, the expansion of drug consumption from a niche activity to something done by normies — whether in the San Francisco summer of love or the UK rave scene of the late ‘80s and early ’90s — led not to consciousness expansion and social and economic transformation, but more often to loneliness, mental illness and death.
Their song “Peg”, famously sampled in De la Soul’s “Eye Know”, was written about a woman desperate to find stardom, who ends up appearing in porn films (“foreign movies”). While she obtains the short-term fame and fortune she had sought, the chorus warns, Peg, it will come back to you — a salutary lesson for young women on OnlyFans today, who may feel a brief empowerment and even earn some money, at the cost of having their content on the internet forever, to be stumbled across by their children and grandchildren.
It is about time the hipster music press gave Steely Dan their due, but we shouldn’t ignore the core message of their lyrics. And it’s no surprise these words resonate with Gen Z TikTokers — in many ways a more cynical, sober, and even conservative generation than the two that came before them”.
As magnificent and unique as Steely Dan are, you would like to think that, somewhere in the musical wings, there is another band or artist who are hoping to emulate their sound or update their music. If the ‘originals’ are finding a new generation of listeners tune into their sound, what happens beyond this?! Is the reason we do not really have a modern-day Steely Dan is because of that (the music) is so detailed, contradictory at times, and altogether impossible to explain and easily define?! The Atlantic wrote a feature back in May that illustrated how Steely Dan’s music has captured a new generation’s hearts:
“Steely Dan’s music posed a question: Was it possible to be an ironist and a perfectionist simultaneously? Was taking rock and roll this seriously a high-concept joke, or the only way to unlock the music’s full creative potential? Or had Steely Dan somehow come up with a blend of both, a virtuosic balancing act of scathing satire and fervent earnestness? At one point, Pappademas describes Fagen and Becker as “cynical about their own cynicism,” a phrase that hints at the fierce idealism that runs beneath the surface of even their iciest music.
IN THIS IMAGE: Cathy Berberian from Your Gold Teeth (from Countdown to Ecstasy)/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
Such contradictions made Steely Dan an anomalous presence in the landscape of 1970s rock. The band-that-wasn’t-really-a-band was devoid of the phallic swagger of, say, Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith. While Bruce Springsteen was redefining heroic authenticity and gracing the covers of national magazines, Fagen and Becker retreated behind their retinue of characters. Steely Dan’s ever-changing lineups deprived the band’s public of the personality-driven soap operas that fans thrilled to in groups such as the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. The pair’s refusal to tour stood out as arena rock became a massive business; Fagen and Becker never even appeared on one of their studio-album covers. At a time when rock stardom was synonymous with being cool, the two of them seemed uninterested in being rock stars and completely indifferent to being cool.
Aja’s success was unusual, even for this unusual band. Released just weeks after Elvis Presley died and in the middle of the year that punk broke, the album became the biggest commercial hit of Steely Dan’s career, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart. Fans debate whether it’s the best Steely Dan album, but it’s certainly the quintessential Steely Dan album. An extraordinary fusion of styles filtered through the duo’s explosively ambitious songcraft and sonic architecture, Aja features more than 30 credited musicians, a who’s who of the world’s top jazz, rock, and R&B session players.
IN THIS IMAGE: Third World Man from Third World Man (from the 1980 album, Gaucho)/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press
An old joke about Steely Dan’s reliance on studio musicians has it that Fagen and Becker were writing music so difficult that they couldn’t even play it themselves. This isn’t true: Both were terrific instrumentalists and can be heard all over Aja. Still, the deployment of so many hired guns was one of the most controversial and misunderstood aspects of their endeavor; detractors, viewing it as proof of prefab inauthenticity, disparaged Steely Dan as essentially a factory dedicated to turning out the world’s most finely tuned musical product.
But enlisting studio players, far from an abdication of artistic vision, was a fanatical assertion of Fagen and Becker’s vision. The fantasy that rock-and-roll bands are democracies—melting pots of individual contributions and sensibilities, wholes greater than the sum of their parts—is deep-seated and attractive. By Aja, Steely Dan had dispensed with such notions (if its founders had ever embraced them): Fagen and Becker were the bosses, and everyone else was an employee. To use a famous example, the pair reportedly brought in as many as eight different guitarists to try playing the roughly 25-second guitar solo on “Peg.” (Jay Graydon finally got it, after what he later recalled as “four, five hours” of takes.)
From one angle, this looks like tyrannical micromanagement; from another, it looks like the sort of uncompromising rigor and sacrifice—of time, money, and other people’s individual talent—in the service of a relentless aspiration that certain great art requires. In the case of Steely Dan, listeners can find themselves under unforgiving pressure too: Insistent about making music entirely on their terms, Fagen and Becker deliver a sound defined by calculating precision, one that offers little of the visceral thrill of impulsivity that many fans expect from rock music. It’s a listening experience that some will find deeply alienating, others endlessly alluring”.
There are a couple of other features I want to bring in before I wrap up. There has been so much Steely Dan media movement in the past couple of months that I need to bring as much of it together as possible. It seems our capital, London, is very much tuned into ‘The Dan’. The U.K. book launch for the Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay tome was in London (I was lucky enough to attend and get a couple of signed copies). Time Out explained how London is going through this obsession with Steely Dan:
“Last month, I found myself in a darkened cinema in Homerton, listening to Steely Dan’s landmark 1977 album ‘Aja’. I was surrounded by dads accompanied by their thirtysomething graphic-designer kids, but also a significant number of people who definitely weren’t born when these cheesy-listening pioneers released their last great record, 1980’s ‘Gaucho’. The event was Pitchback Playback, which airs classic albums to eyemask-wearing audiences so they can shut off all their other senses and fully appreciate every dimension of production magic. More fascinating than all that, though, is that this wasn’t the only Steely Dan-dedicated event to have happened in London lately. Far from it.
Despite it being more than 50 years since the release of the band’s debut album – and the fact that Walter Becker, half of Steely Dan’s core duo completed by Donald Fagen, died in 2017 – London seems to be currently gripped in a bout of extreme Dan-mania. Once thought of as being too naff to make it into the hearts of the cool kids, the slick and intricate act are now all the rage. A covers band, The Royal Scammers, just completed a week-long January residency at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, while Nearly Dan play Camden’s Jazz Cafe this month. There’s also still time to catch Stanley Dee, a third (third!!) Steely Dan tribute act, who play Nell’s in Kensington at the end of February.
That’s not all. Turn on deeply influential and zeitgeist-capturing independent radio station NTS and you’re more than likely to hear a Steely Dan track, especially if you tune into breakfast show hosts Flo Dill or Zakia Sewell, who are both extremely fond of starting the day at the Dalston studio with a dose of Dan. Elsewhere, Reading-born, London-based DJ and banger-machine SG Lewis revealed that ‘Lifetime’ – the lead single from his recently released new album – was deeply inspired by Steely Dan’s brand of hyper-intelligent yacht rock. London rockers The Family Dog have also cited their parents’ Steely Dan record collection as a key influence, while London-raised, Bristol-based experimental act Park Motive is in thrall to the ‘bizarre seediness’ of Donald Fagen.
There was always something a little off-kilter about Steely Dan, not least in the fact they took their name from a dildo
Look further afield than the capital, and Etsy is awash with knock-off Steely Dan T-shirts. On TikTok you’ll find cheerful teens dancing to the band’s iconic single ‘Peg’, a song that has ‘no right going off that hard’, according to one shimmying new fan. Even Netflix is in on the trend. Its recent ‘Knives Out’ murder mystery ‘Glass Onion’ contains a host of Steely Dan Easter eggs, from a massive tour poster to a Cuban Breeze cocktail – a reference to a lyric from Donald Fagen’s solo album ‘The Nightfly’ – and an assistant called Peg. Director Rian Johnson is, evidently, a huge fan. On Grammys night, notoriously grumpy music industry veteran Steve Albini took to Twitter to dump on the band, writing ‘I will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan’. Pretty soon the band’s name started trending, and a host of artists and fans jumped to their defence, including musicians Jenny Lewis and St Vincent, who wrote ‘For the record – I fucking love Steely Dan’.
So why all the Steely Dan love, and why now?
To find answers, we went to Flo Dill, who has officially played the most Steely Dan records of any DJ on NTS.
‘As I get older I’m less and less concerned with having “cool” music taste,’ she explains of her own personal love for the band. ‘Also, Steely Dan are interesting. It’s complex pop music and incredibly well recorded and amazingly mixed and produced.’ It’s that timelessness and sheer craft, then – as well as a lack of embarrassment about liking a band who might lack the obvious sexiness and edge of many of their 1970s contemporaries – which have made Steely Dan the hottest sound of 2023.
‘Whenever I play them on the show people in the chatroom love it,’ adds Dill. ‘And if you’re a Steely Dan fan and you hear someone else play Steely Dan, you’re going to make yourself known! They’re not an acquired taste, but they are cheesy in many ways and it’s definitely more acceptable to be a Dan fan than it used to be.’
Ben Gomori, who runs the Pitchblack Playback events, agrees: ‘My theory is that we’ve now reached a point in time and cultural history where anything that is of quality, or acclaimed in its time – and this goes for fashion as well – as long as you wear it or live it authentically and convincingly and cohesively, people don’t look down their nose at you anymore’.
Gomori cites the popularity of a recent Pitchblack Playback session he hosted for 1996’s ‘Travelling Without Moving’ by Jamiroquai – a band who have had their fair share of flak for being the antithesis of cool. ‘You’re allowed to like what you like, and nothing is beyond the pale,’ he says. ‘There's less snobbery, particularly as new audiences come through, who’ve grown up with less genre restrictions.’ He’s also keen to give a nod to the scene-setting approach of London’s favourite indie station, who this summer are hosting their first-ever music festival in Burgess Park. ‘Don’t underestimate the power of NTS – it can be extremely influential!’
Steely Dan: a history
The idea that younger listeners are less jaded rings true. There’s a whole generation out there who don’t care if something’s supposed to be trendy and just care if something’s good. And no matter what your opinion on the band’s output, it’s impossible to deny Steely Dan’s musical prowess.
For those not yet in the throes of a full-blown Steely Dan obsession, here’s a quick primer. The band was founded in New York by college friends Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The pair moved to Los Angeles to record their 1972 debut ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’. A platinum-selling hit, the singles are still instantly familiar half a century later: ‘Do It Again’, ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ and ‘Dirty Work’. Their personal distaste for flashy US mainstream rock belied their success and also their sound. Sasha Geffen’s 2019 review of the album for Pitchfork sums them up perfectly: ‘They wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise.’ They sold albums by the truckload, but there was always something a little off-kilter about Steely Dan, not least in the fact they took their name from a dildo in William Burroughs’s 1959 novel ‘The Naked Lunch’.
Becker and Fagen spent the 1970s releasing acclaimed album after acclaimed album, before disbanding in 1981. Becker moved to Hawaii where he got off drugs and got on avocado farming, while Fagen worked on solo material. The pair reunited in the early 1990s. Though Becker died of oesophagal cancer in 2017, Steely Dan have continued to tour. Last summer, Fagen and the band played a run of 42 shows across the US, including a night at Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl. I was there and it was heroic. Did I swing dance on the steps of the legendary venue with a man that could have been my dodgy uncle to the sweet, smooth sounds of ‘Kid Charlemagne’? I sure did.
Also in the audience at January’s Pitchback Playback event was Hackney-based musician and DJ Lou Hayter. Steely Dan have long been her favourite band. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to one of those things, and “Aja” was the perfect album to hear in that environment,’ she says of the experience. ‘I played that album to death so it’s the one I play most sparingly these days, but I heard loads of detail I’ve never heard before, and was completely blown away all over again. They’re very visual, almost cinematic. I felt like I’d been transported to LA and back.’
IN THIS PHOTO: Lou Hayter (whose 2021 album, Private Sunshine, featured a cover of Steely Dan’s Time Out of Mind (from Gaucho)/PHOTO CREDIT: Elise Michely
Hayter got into Steely Dan in her teens after hearing jazz and soul DJ Patrick Forge play ‘Peg’ on the radio and recognising the sample from De La Soul’s hip hop classic, ‘Eye Know’ – which has just hit streaming platforms for the first time ever, bringing the sound of Steely Dan to even more ears. ‘I fell in love with it and went out and bought all their records, but I didn’t know anyone else that was into them. It was one of those things that I just listened to on my own.’ Slowly, that started to change. One of the first fellow Steely Dan fans Hayter met was Mark Ronson, discovering their mutual love of the band touring together when Hayter was in nu-rave act New Young Pony Club. Superfan Ronson can be seen wearing not one, but two different Steely Dan shirts in his 2021 Apple TV music doc ‘Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson’, and he recently referred to Fagen as ‘our lord of irony-imbued superjams’ on Twitter while wishing him a happy birthday.
Continuing to spread the good word about Steely Dan, Hayter is currently compiling a mixtape of the band’s affiliated acts, from Texan singer and model Rosie Vela to Merseyside new wave band China Crisis. She chalks up the current Steely Dan revival to the resurgence of soul music as well as the impact of our parents’ record collections.
‘There’s a warmth and soulfulness in those songs,’ she says, ‘but I actually listened to Donald Fagen talk about this himself, and he wondered if it’s because millennials’ parents were listening to Steely Dan, so it’s all about familiarity for them. But they’re also just the best band ever, so of course people are going to listen to them!’”.
Let’s finish off with extracts from NPR. They spoke with Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay about their book, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. It is clear Steely Dan are a paradox. They are so original and of their time, and yet there are these enduring songs played on the radio today. Perhaps more common on U.S. radio, but I guess there are a dozen or so of their songs played fairly regularly:
“The chapters in this book give such deep studies of the personalities who populate Steely Dan's songs (and, by extension, of the musicians who brought them to life). Did your relationship with any of these songs change while writing about them, illustrating them, or otherwise getting inside the heads of these characters? Did you learn anything about the songs that genuinely surprised you while working on this project?
LeMay: I learned so much. On our weekly calls, Alex always excitedly ushered me into the entrance of several wormholes he'd been traversing, and it was a constant delight. Thinking deeply about what these characters were wearing, what they might've been doing in the narrative beyond the narrative, thinking about their environment, how they held their faces, how they held their bodies — it was an immersive way to listen. I'd had ideas in my head about so many of the characters because I tend to think visually, but there were lots of fantastic surprises, like when we dug into Cathy Berberian, for instance. I'd never looked up what she looked like before.
Pappademas: I think what surprised me the most as I dug deeper into these songs was how much empathy Donald and Walter seemed to have for their characters. It's not something they're usually given credit for — the idea people have about them is that they're always snickering amongst themselves, making fun of the people they write about, but I think that's actually more true of somebody like Randy Newman than it is of Becker/Fagen. I think there's always a real sense of humanity's plight underneath whatever coldness or archness is more easily detectable in their work on first blush — even when the people they're writing about are doomed or deluded or depraved, you don't get the sense that they're judging these characters, most of the time. There's an attention paid to the human longing that motivates people to these weird actions and they don't judge the longing, of, say, the guy who's hung up on a sex worker in "Pearl of the Quarter" — whereas Frank Zappa, given the same storyline, would absolutely write about what a moron that guy is.
Steely Dan's lyrics are famously somewhat cryptic, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were quite averse to having their lyrics read as straightforward personal narratives. It's clear that so much research went into illuminating these songs, but there's also a healthy dose of creative speculation, too, both in how the subjects of the songs are described and how they're depicted.
LeMay: The only characters I painted that weren't 100% creative speculation (and really, less speculation and more my personal interpretation) were those having to do with actual, living people, like Cathy Berberian, Jill St. John and G. Gordon Liddy. I had a folder on my computer called "DAN CASTING GALLERY" full of images of people in my life, found photos, '60s and '70s fashion catalogs, advertisements and sewing pattern packaging. I painted from a melange of those images mixed with things that had been in my head forever, as well as from a ton of photos of my own body posing in different ways for reference. The most important thing to me was getting the humanity — the profoundly flawed humanity — of these characters right.
Pappademas: And it works — I try to get across that humanity in the text, but having Joan populate this world with real human faces made the finished product into something greater than I could have gotten to on my own.
Anyway, my answer to the question above is that when I'm writing criticism, for sure, but also when I'm writing reported pieces, I feel like there's always an element of creative speculation in what I do. It's just more or less constrained by facts depending on what kind of piece it is. Even if you've sat in a room with somebody for hours you're ultimately imagining their inner life based on what they've told you, and sometimes on what they haven't told you. In terms of Quantum Criminals, yeah, Steely Dan definitely tried to discourage any attempt to read these lyrics autobiographically — and the fact that all their lyrics were composed by (or at least credited to) two writers was their first line of defense against that kind of reading, because even when they're writing in the first person you're conscious that the "I" in every Dan song is to whatever degree a fictional character and therefore a distancing device.
But I think it's human nature — or at least it's my human nature — to intuit the opposite and look for places where the art seems to correspond to what we know to be the contours of an artist's life. Because the other thing about Steely Dan is they liked to obfuscate; the fact that they rarely owned up to their music having an autobiographical component (with certain exceptions, notably "Deacon Blues," which they admitted was pretty personal) doesn't mean it wasn't autobiographical. And at times — as with "Gaucho," a song about a duo torn apart by a third party who might be the personification of drugs or other forms of hedonism, recorded for the album Donald made mostly without Walter because Walter's addiction issues had pulled him away from the band — the correspondences became too tempting to not explore. Which is what happens when you write cryptically; it's human nature to decrypt.
I don't know; I guess I'm doing the same thing Taylor Swift's fans do when they decide that some opaque lyric is an Easter egg about this or that relationship of hers, or what A.J. Weberman was doing when he decided "The sun isn't yellow, it's chicken" was Bob Dylan confessing to faking his own death, or what the people who think The Shining was Stanley Kubrick exorcizing his guilt over faking the moon landing. The difference is that I think I'm right and I think those other people are all nuts, because I'm in my bubble and can't imagine the view from theirs.
Finally, what do you hope readers — be they longtime devotees, newly converted fans or Steely Dan skeptics — take away from Quantum Criminals?
LeMay: I think that in a lot of ways, this book can be read as something that's about the ridiculous cacophony of what it is to be a person in the world, striving to do something you're happy with. In a lot of other ways, it is a real invitation to truly dive into what you love with reckless abandon — to dream about it hard, to see and hear and appreciate the small details and the big ways you feel as a result of giving yourself the gift of paying attention. I hope that readers come away from the book thinking about all the ways they have yet to enjoy not just Steely Dan, but anything that moves them.
Pappademas: I hope people come away from this book thinking about how, even though perfectionism can undo you as an artist and any book about how to make your art will tell you that over and over, there's still something noble and useful about aspiring to perfection — that there's magic in the falling-short but also in the reaching-for. I also hope these stories inspire young people to say no to drugs”.
At a time when A.I. is replicating artists and extracting vocals and parts of songs to make somethi9ng ‘new’, I am essentially asking whether Steely Dan can be replicated today. I think they are very much A.I.-immune, as their work is so much the work of sentient beings. Technology cannot replicate the sheer craft and warmth; the nuances and emotional blends you get in the songs. Let’s hope A.I. never attempts to make a stab at a ‘lost Steely Dan album’. I think Donald Fagen would have something to say about it! With this huge new burst of Steely Dan attention and awareness, it makes me wonder what happens when the musical dust clears. Can any artist in the modern age take the best elements of Steely Dan’s music and do something fresh? It would be nice to hear someone coming through that very much are the progeny of The Dan. They might not be able to get Donald Fagen’s vocal down. But they can write music that has rich and layered compositions together with frequently sardonic, witty and character-driven lyrics. It would ensure that Steely Dan’s legacy remains strong and inspires others. Are good kings Walter and Don (paraphrasing Can’t Buy a Thrill’s Kings: “We seen the last of Good King Richard/Ring out the past his name lives on/Roll out the bones and raise up your pitcher/Raise up your glass to Good King John”) destined to be without heirs?! It is wonderful they are very much resonating with new fans and getting all this love right now. I often think about whether we will see artists come through that genuinely can be compared with them. I think the superb Lou Hayter is the closest we have (she is phenomenal and a massive Steely Dan head!). Regardless, let us all hope, when it comes to this ‘Danaissance’, that it…
KEEPS on going strong.