First there was ‘The Nightfly’. Then ‘Kamakiriad’. And now, a mere 24 years on, the trilogy is complete. the London Telegraph’s Robert Sandall meets Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen in New York to discuss the finer points of despair
Slumped in a velvet armchair in the gaudily decorated “interview room” at his record label’s Manhattan HQ, Donald Fagen looks totally out of place. To his fans, this is exactly the way it should be.
A congenitally rumpled figure, Fagen has always inhabited a parallel universe to the glitzy, brittle one celebrated here at Warner Music, his clutch of platinum discs notwithstanding.
For the past three and a half decades, with and without Steely Dan, Fagen has ignored trends, blanked the image-making process that goes with them and created a timeless kind of pre-rock music infused with jazzy sophistication and a stinging satirical wit.
Fagen is not the sort of artist you would expect to see celebrated on the corridor walls in this building alongside framed posters of Green Day, Madonna and Michael Bublé; and sure enough he isn’t. Of his forthcoming solo album, Morph the Cat, there is, as far as I can make out, not a mention.
Interviewing this formidably intelligent man, who has a long track record of avoiding prying journalists, is, it must be said, a slightly daunting prospect. What if he turns out to be as spiky in person as he sometimes is in his songs? Today, however, Fagen is keeping his sarky side under wraps. He speaks gruffly, but straightforwardly.
The new album, he says, came about because, unlike his partner in Steely Dan, Walter Becker, he is “not good at vacations.” Having spent most of the past five years recording two albums and touring the world to great acclaim with Steely Dan (who reconvened in 2000 after a 19-year lay-off ), “we basically decided to take a break.”
For Fagen this meant going straight back to work on his third solo album. “Because I had been wanting to do something that would make a trilogy out of the other two.”
A sequel, in other words, to 1982’s The Nightfly and its successor Kamakiriad (1993).
Though he has been more prolific recently than at any time since Steely Dan’s glory days in the 1970s, Fagen views this final part of the trilogy, rather perversely, as a valedictory take on his entire life, a sort of portrait of the artist as an old man.
“The Nightfly was me as a young person. Kamakiriad essentially was about my middle-age years, and it felt unfinished. Now I’m 58, this new one could just about cap it off.”
The two big events that shaped it were 9/11 – which Fagen witnessed at a not very safe distance from his New York apartment – and the death of his mother in 2003.
“This thread of mortality had a big effect on my life,” he says. “In my case, pain is good for work.” It certainly sounds like it. His new solo album is the most approachable of the three, both in terms of its melodic appeal and its acerbic commentary on America now.
The breezily surreal opening track sets the tone, telling of a mysterious marauding feline who bewitches the inhabitants of a city very like New York . The cat idea came to Fagen, as many of his ideas do, from a book, this one by “some French symbolist poet.”
Morph was originally conceived as “an anti-9/11 figure, something that comes out of the sky that is positive.” However, positivity and Fagen are uneasy bedfellows. “By the time I finished writing it, I had flipped it in my mind and started to see this cat as something that has a narcotic effect on the citizenry, a metaphor for something that keeps them brain-dead.”
Kicking against the prevailing orthodoxy has apparently been the keynote of Fagen’s life. As a teenager growing up in the suburban sprawl of New Jersey in the early 1960s, he turned his back on the pop-rock revolution and headed off to the jazz clubs of Manhattan. When he was only 13, he saw the likes of Count Basie, Charles Mingus and Coleman Hawkins at Birdland, where the owner “used to sit me on a banquette and give me cokes.” While all his friends were learning to play guitars, he mastered the piano.
Later, at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, he befriended and began writing songs with Becker, a fellow student, whose guitar playing he liked. For years, the pair’s tentative desire to form a group was thwarted by their extreme pickiness when it came to choosing vocalists.
Just as the old Tin Pan Alley ethos was giving way to the era of singer-songwriters, Fagen and Becker decided the time was right to go for jobs as journeymen tunesmiths in the emptying Brill Building.
They were subsequently taken on as staff songwriters in LA by the only record label that still employed people in that capacity. “But we were terrible at writing pop tunes. Nobody ever recorded any of them because they were uncoverable. So we defaulted to the band idea.”
Fagen considers that Steely Dan’s success was a historical accident brought about by the advent in the early 1970s of FM radio, where for a time muso DJs were allowed to compile their own playlists. He insists that they never courted commercial success.
“Walter and I started with the idea that freedom was a given because our heroes were Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins.” As the ’70s wore on, Fagen and Becker’s uncompromising insistence on jazz-standard performances from their sidemen again found them battling against the tide and, after the Gauchoalbum in 1981, forced them to put Steely Dan on ice. In any case, by the early 1980s, the two men had started to outgrow a creative relationship. “The collective persona we developed in Steely Dan was of a guy who doesn’t have a girl, a slacker dude prone to defensive manoeuvres and total breakdowns.” At this Fagen laughs like a drain.
He says that even though he is happily married to a former singer-songwriter, is proud of his solo work, and is looking forward to undertaking his first solo tour this summer, the recently revived partnership with Becker is still a major part of his life.
“When we’re together,” he says, “something bad happens. That guys-without-girls thing: there’s something adolescent about it. I must have some recidivist teenage urge I guess.”
March 2, 2006
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