Originally published on July 18, 2013 By Alan Sculley Finger Lakes Times GENEVA, NY — In the 1970s, Steely Dan became that decade’s ultimate studio band, having decided in 1975 to quit touring to concentrate on turning out studio albums like Pretzel Logic (1974), The Royal Scam (1976) and Aja (1977). Donald Fagen and […]
Steely Dan’s Fagen and Becker Say New Music ‘In the Air’
Originally published on July 17, 2013 By Chuck Yarborough The Cleveland Plain Dealer CLEVELAND — Remember elementary-school science class, when Mr. Wizard talked about polarity of magnets, how the south end of one magnet repelled the south end of another, while the opposite ends were instantly attached? Well, on a whole BUNCH of levels, Steely […]
New Steely Dan Album? ‘It’s In the Air’
By Gary Graff Billboard Walter Becker says he and Donald Fagen can “smell” a new Steely Dan album coming, the first since the 2003 Top 10 entry “Everything Must Go.” “It’s in the air, it really is,” Becker told Billboard during a good-naturedly sarcastic conference call with reporters to advance the group’s Mood Swings 2013: […]
Jon Herington – Steely Dan’s Lead Guitarist
By Leslie Michele Derrough Glide Magazine If Jon Herington is anything, idle is not it. It may have taken him a little while to get to where he is today, playing guitar in Steely Dan since 2000 and fronting his own band, but he has never really stopped and piddled his time away. In fact, the […]
Steely Dan’s Planet D’Sound Quality
SQ Logic: Our favorite audiophile-centric recording duo wax poetically on the necessary elements of great recordings. By Mike Mettler Sound+Vision Magazine With a score of dates set to go now on sale tomorrow today (4/26) for Steely Dan’s Mood Swings 2013: 8 Miles to Pancake Day summer/fall tour, I thought it only appropriate to revisit the time I’ve spent over the years with our […]
How did Steely Dan beat Eminem for 2000 Grammy?
By Charles Bright GoldDerby.com In recent years, one Grammy contest that has been misunderstood is Album of the Year in 2000, when ’70s jam-band Steely Dan’s “Two Against Nature” upset the heavily favored and extremely controversial Eminem for “The Marshall Mathers LP.” Their victory is usually thought of as simply the Recording Academy rewarding a […]
Glamour Profession: The Bassists of Donald Fagen’s Sunken Condos
By Chris Jisi Bass Player Magazine It remains one of the most exclusive and longest-running clubs in the sideman realm: cutting bass tracks for Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—either in their collective form, Steely Dan, or on their equally sophisticated solo CDs. What bassist wouldn’t want to join the likes of Chuck Rainey, Anthony Jackson, […]
Role Models: Donald Fagen
By Paul Zollo American Songwriter On the occasion of Donald Fagen’s latest non-Steely Dan effort, Sunken Condos, we sat down to talk about this new classic, and the previous ones. You and Walter Becker are among the few songwriters to extend the vocabulary of chords. Back in the days when they wrote standards, a lot of composers were […]
How to Be an Aging Rocker
By Terry Teachout Wall Street Journal What does it mean to say that a work of art is “dated”? I know people who sincerely believe that Shakespeare’s plays are dated because of the way in which they portray women, a point of view that says far more about the complainants in question than it does […]
Steely Dan Co-Capt. Finds Freedom on ‘Condos’
By Russell Hall Music and Musicians Two years ago Donald Fagen decided to wipe the slate clean. His first three solo albums –1982’s The Nightfly, 1993’sKamakiriad and 2006’s Morph the Cat –had been tied together by unified themes, based on stages of Fagen’s life. For his new record, Sunken Condos, Fagen cast aside such constraints. “Those first three albums, which […]
