Tag Archives | Donald Fagen

By Janet Maslin The New York Times If you like Steely Dan’s greatest hits too much, Donald Fagen of that band probably hates you already. You may be one of the “TV babies” who illegally download those songs, show up at his concerts expecting to hear familiar hits, have no patience for anything soulful or […]

By Elias LeightPaste Magazine Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan coheres loosely: It’s a series of semi-biographical but not necessarily related essays—reflecting on Fagen’s youth and musical influences—combined with a tour diary from 2012. Fagen reminisces about seeing jazz greats at the Village Vanguard, joins the Sci-Fi Book Club and comments on the […]

By Jeff MiersBuffalo News Steely Dan, the band co-founded by Bard College chums Donald Fagen and Walter Becker at the end of the ’60s, made its name by combining the influences of Duke Ellington, R&B, funk and pop with a consistently brilliant strain of lyric-writing that was the very definition of sardonic. That this band […]

Moments of musical transcendence and life on the road … this dry white whine from the Steely Dan singer is a memoir to savour By Anthony QuinnThe Guardian This book is a piece of pure bliss, and it’s not even the book I thought or hoped it would be. When they said a memoir by […]

By Simon Sweetmanoffthetracks.co.nz You could never expect a man who made his name by placing the incongruous inside happy-sounding so-slick pop-jazz ditties to write a conventional memoir; Steely Dan is as much a magic act as it is a musical act -– and not just for the fact that you’re either under the spell or […]

Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen Writes a Not-Quite-Memoir By David Bamundo Wall Street Journal In his 40-plus-year career, Donald Fagen has been praised for his lyrics, both as one of Steely Dan’s co-founders and in his solo work. Now, his nonlyrical writings have been collected in Eminent Hipsters, a not-quite-memoir released by Viking and celebrated at […]

By John Mulveyuncut.co.uk In his excellent Uncut review of the Morrissey Autobiography, Michael alludes to the get-out clause afforded rock memoirists post-Chronicles: why bother obfuscating certain awkward details when you can, by being capricious with time and chronology, just skip the difficult stuff? Since my reading of Morrissey’s book has thus far been limited to […]

By Daniel Scheffler Edge on the Net There’s nothing quite like a music man revealing his thoughts on the world, to the world. Everyone perks up his ears and squints his eyes for this kind of revelation. And this comes as great pleasure from cofounder (also front man and keyboardist) of Steely Dan, Mister Donald […]

‘Eminent Hipsters‘ is a witty, erudite selection of essays by Steely Dan’s grumpy old frontman, Donald Fagen By Bernadette McNulty The (London) Telegraph I remember the first time a friend presented me with a Steely Dan CD. It was both a gift and a test, an initiation into music beyond what then, among Nineties rave […]