Welcome to the Steely Dan Reader, formerly called the Steely Dan Internet Resource. This site is home to more than four decades of interviews, profiles and concert reviews of Steely Dan and its founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. We also maintain the text archives of Metal Leg, the great newsletter that from 1987 through […]
Getting Started on the Site
Many of you reading this have already consumed the 100-plus articles housed on our predecessor site, The Steely Dan Internet Resource. Those articles are all here on the new site. In addition we now have an additional 350 more interviews and reviews, and that number is growing. To find articles of interest, you may: Search […]
Most Popular Pages of 2017
It was a year to test our fortitude, that’s for sure. Donald Fagen found new energy on the road with a young band. But Walter Becker took a hike to that ditch out in the valley. Who knew it was for him? Here are the most popular stories from The Steely Dan Reader in 2017. […]
Smooth tunes with sharp little bones
By David BennunThe Guardian Originally published on Oct. 30, 2017 LONDON — If Bruce Springsteen, in his own wry summation, avoided honest labour by writing about it, then Steely Dan have made a roaring success of narrating failure. Their songs are largely concerned with what you could call Steely Dan Man: a figure out of time, place […]
Steely Dan at 3Arena for BluesFest 2017
‘If I could see them again tomorrow night I wouldn’t hesitate – put these bands on your bucket list!’ By Deirdre ConroyIrish Independent Review Originally published on Oct. 29, 2017 DUBLIN, Ireland — The mere stage set up of Steely Dan last night at 3 Arena had the sophistication of a New York jazz club. […]
A Jazz Appreciation of Steely Dan
By Eugene Holley, Jr.New Music Box Originally published on Sept. 20, 2017 “We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.” – Walter Becker in 1974 The death of Walter Becker—the bespectacled and bearded guitarist, bassist, composer, lyricist, and one-half of the […]
More Ovaltine — er, Opaline — Please
Originally published on April 13, 2017 By John Katsilometes Las Vegas Review-Journal We’ll forgive Steely Dan’s Walter Becker for referring to the mayor of Las Vegas as “him” on Wednesday night. Becker, and the band, get a lifetime pass. Becker’s glancing reference was during his onstage monologue midway through Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Chips” residency at […]
Digging Deep Into ‘Deacon Blues’
Originally published on Jan. 10, 2017 By Andy Kahn JamBase Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen turns 69 years old today (1/10/2017). In the early 1970s, he and Walter Becker established the jazz-leaning Steely Dan and soon found themselves counted among the premiere musicians in rock. The pair’s complex compositions, tight arrangements and enlisting of top-notch session players helped produce some […]
Ranking Steely Dan’s Albums
By Kenji FujishimaPaste Magazine Published on Oct. 25, 2016 It’s been almost 40 years since Rolling Stone dubbed Steely Dan “the perfect musical antiheroes of the Seventies” in assessing the band’s sixth album Aja. But while the Walter Becker and Donald Fagen-led band named after a dildo in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch may seem more […]
Jazz Masterpiece Came Together in Fragments
Originally published on Oct. 20, 2016 By Rashod Ollison The Virginian-Pilot Horace Silver’s prolific recording sessions for the venerable Blue Note label in the ’50s and ’60s were usually succinct. Whatever the hard-bop pianist and his accompanists put down in the studio found its way onto an album with very little fat or filler. It […]
‘Aja’ stuns at the Beacon Theatre
Originally published on Oct. 19, 2016 By Alex Biese Asbury Park Press NEW YORK — Over the last several years, artists from Bruce Springsteen to Public Enemy have engaged in the lucrative and crowd-pleasing practice of performing their classic albums in concert, to varying degrees of success. But if there’s one act that seems ideally suited […]
Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho
Originally published on Oct. 6, 2016 By Paul Grimstad Paris Review The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He […]
