By David Randall Getreadytorock.com I know, it’s awfully uncool to admit you like a Donald Fagen album. Maybe I’m suffering from post-Steely Dan crisis. The erstwhile Dan co-founder, “voice” and keyboards player is back with only his third solo album. In 1982 it was the critically-acclaimed The Nightfly, in 1993 Kamakiriad. ‘Morph The Cat’ has […]
Tag Archives | Morph the Cat
Fagen Wraps His Strange Trilogy With ‘Morph’
By Jonathan Casey Jazzpolice.com Singer, keyboard player, and oddball songwriter Donald Fagen has laid bare his jazzy aspirations ever since Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic album, on which he covered Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and aped Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father” (compare to the intro of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”). Never have I […]
‘Morph the Cat’ Reprise
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 […]
At Long Last, Fagen Puts The ‘Cat’ Out
By Ira Robbins Special to Newsday Donald Fagen makes and releases solo albums on a timetable more familiar to comet-watchers than observers of pop’s hectic rush. Working in the off portions of Steely Dan’s four decades of on-and-off-again existence, the Grammy-winning singer-keyboardist from Passaic, N.J., has come up with three albums in 24 years, and […]
‘Morph the Cat’ Publicity Piece
From donaldfagen.com in connection with ‘Morph the Cat’ release Donald Fagen’s Morph The Cat is just your average soulful and sexy masterpiece about love, death and homeland defense. “There’s nothing sexier than the Apocalypse,” Fagen explains helpfully. “I suppose you could call this album Apocalypse Wow.” The darkly beautiful third solo effort from Fagen — […]
What Rhymes With Orange Alert?
By Fred Kaplan For The New York Times This is my death album,” Donald Fagen said in his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “It’s about the death of culture, the death of politics, the beginning of the end of my life.” Then he mock-sobbed, “Boo hoo hoo.” Mr. Fagen, best known as […]
Steely Dan’s Fagen Ready to Morph
By Jonathan Cohen Billboard Finding love in an airport security line, a ghostly feline hovering above New York and imaginary conversations with the late Ray Charles are not usual topics addressed in rock ‘n’ roll. But they’re prime subjects in the alternate musical universe of Steely Dan principal Donald Fagen, whose third album, Morph the Cat, […]
Review of Morph The Cat
By Andy Gill The Independent In an age when skilful PR hype and internet downloads have combined to shrink the gap between an artist’s first steps and their acclaim as Greatest Thing Ever to little more than a few nanoseconds, the appearance of a new Donald Fagen album serves to provide a little perspective, and […]
What Will the Cat Drag In?
By Neil Drysdale Scotland Herald His voice sounds akin to Bogart’s in The Big Sleep; a guttural drawl of laconic humour mixed with a man’s-gotta-do cynicism. Donald Fagen has grown up, steeped in the oeuvre of Damon Runyon and Raymond Chandler, so perhaps it is hardly surprising that nothing surprises him any more about his native […]
