By Geoffrey Himes
Washington Post
How do you write a song about homeland security without sounding preachy or trite? On the other hand, how do you make honest music in 2006 without writing about homeland security?
Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen solves this challenge on his terrific third solo album, Morph the Cat. He turns newspaper headlines into personal stories, sometimes twisted for humor and sometimes for paranoia.
On “Security Joan,” he has fun with the sexual connotations of a frisking at an airport gate; his slinky keyboards buzz like an X-ray machine as he purrs in his faux-soul voice, “Confiscate my shoes … search me now.” “The Night Belongs to Mona” offers a darker view of the same subject. Ever since “the fire downtown” on 9/11, Mona is afraid to go out. She spends all her time inside her 40th-floor Manhattan apartment, “CDs spinnin’, AC hummin’, feelin’ pretty.” Is that pity or sympathy we hear in Fagen’s voice?
Darker still is “Mary Shut the Garden Door,” with its eerie melodica and ominous images of government agents hiding behind the dark-tinted windows of Lincoln Town Cars as they point their headlights through the blinds of our windows. Even the romantic fantasy of “The Great Pagoda of Funn,” he admits, is an escape from the real world “of psycho moms and dying stars and dirty bombs.”
No one was ever better at fusing jazz and post-Beatles pop than Steely Dan, and Fagen continues down that path with ambitious chord changes and elastic rhythms that hint at both swing and rock. He hires such gifted jazz musicians as saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, trumpeter Marvin Stamm and guitarist Wayne Krantz and allows them to stretch out in solos within arrangements that more often than not extend beyond the six-minute mark.
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