By Dylan Jones GQ Magazine – UK As an eminent hipster himself, Donald Fagen is more than adequately qualified to write about cool. As one half of Steely Dan, and as a solo artist, Fagen has been responsible for some of the coolest music of the last fifty years. Not content with creating what many […]
Tag Archives | Donald Fagen
Reelin’ in the Years
Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen writes a portrait of the artist as a grumpy old man. Originally published on Oct. 11, 2013 By Seth Stevenson Slate.com Late last summer, I noticed that Donald Fagen — one half of the 1970s fusion-rock duo Steely Dan — was playing at the Beacon Theater in New York. I bought […]
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 […]
Donald Fagen interview
By Bruce Pollack Songfacts.com At the keyboards, Donald Fagen was the smoky voice and songwriting co-conspirator (with Walter Becker) on all of Steely Dan’s classic hits, from “Reelin’ In The Years” to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” to “Peg” and “Deacon Blues” and “Hey Nineteen.” Carving perverse lyrics into cryptic and sardonic story lines, wound […]
Donald Fagen’s Sunken Condos
By Fred Kaplan Stereophile Donald Fagen isn’t exactly a jazz musician, but he is a musician who plays jazz and whose music is suffused with a jazz sensibility, whether on his own or as co-leader of Steely Dan, so here we go. His 4th solo disc, Sunken Condos (on Reprise), is one of his […]
Donald Fagen Rises to New Heights with “Sunken Condos”
By Dennis Biles San Jose State Spartan Daily Grade: A Donald Fagen, co-founder of legendary rock group Steely Dan, may be getting up there in years but his slick musical style and witty, yet often sarcastic lyricism doesn’t sound dated at all on his latest solo effort “Sunken Condos.” By employing his usual method of […]
Donald Fagen: Sunken Condos
By Zachary Houle PopMatters Associate Music Editor Something funny happened to me while I was listening to Donald Fagen’s fourth solo album, Sunken Condos, and first since 2006’s Morph the Cat. The record company kept a pretty tight leash on this release, and, to make a long story short, I had to download some software […]
