By Paul Zollo
CDNow
They are the core of Steely Dan — Walter Becker and Donald Fagen — the two friends who long ago disbanded the original lineup of their group to surround themselves iRefresh connection with Facebooknstead with the finest jazz and rock players the world had to offer and, in doing so, raised the level of rock production to a standard of excellence few have achieved before or since.
They have recently come back, reunited after a nearly 20-year hiatus, during which both Becker and Fagen recorded solo albums and produced other projects while the Dan was on hold. After several tours in the late ’90s comes a new masterpiece, Two Against Nature, which after some three years in the making, returns with a force almost unimaginable after such a substantial break. It’s got everything that makes Steely Dan great: dynamic oppositions of words and music, and succinct, sardonic lyrics set to the slickest, tightest jazz pop songs can contain. For Becker and Fagen share a passion, bordering on obsession, to push the limits of what songs can do while staying within the realm of rock. Exploring previously unexplored lyrical areas with a wit and ingenuity few others have ever possessed, they’ve stretched both the harmonic and lyrical potential of the pop song.
Now in crystal clear digital sound, it seems that technology has finally caught up with Steely Dan, offering it the perfect palette for the intricate audio details of its music, past and present. Unlike many groups whose albums of the past and present don’t hold up to the refocused scrutiny of digital recording, Steely Dan is the essential digital group — with music as clean as a sparkling new CD.
CDNOW spoke to Becker and Fagen on a cold winter’s day in Manhattan, just before the dawn of the new millennium, about the meaning and magnificence of Two Against Nature, among other subjects. It was evident that although Becker and Fagen are two of the most serious songwriters around, they are also among the funniest. When told that the new album, which has an abundance of both New York and Angeleno imagery, sounds great on both coasts, Becker got a surprisingly big laugh out of Fagen by remarking, “That’s nice to know, but it’s really the middle of the country that we are worried about.
CDNOW: Two Against Nature is an intriguing title, and the title cut of the album.
Donald Fagen: We made it the title cut because we thought it was descriptive of our condition at the present time, because when you start to get older, you really are fighting nature all the time. And musically you’re fighting nature, trying to organize atoms of sound. There are a lot of interpretations. But you’re trying to manipulate or overcome obstacles in nature. Of course, if you take the long view, what we do is part of nature because everything is. But as far as a subjective view — you are really fighting nature.
Walter Becker: Your own internal economy of time, energy, money, ideas, patience.
Fagen: Trying to balance your musical life with other parts of your life. It’s essentially a classic struggle.
Becker: Think of the Two Against Nature album as akin to the building of the Hoover Dam.
Fagen: [Laughs] As a matter of fact, you should tell him about the building.
Becker: [Laughs] Yeah. There’s a window in the control room of Donald’s studio, and we must have been working in there for four or five months, and we noticed that they were starting to build a large high-rise 40-story apartment house on the corner across from the studio. We actually went back in the studio a couple of days ago to add a part to something. And [laughs] when we went back the other day, we noticed that the building was finished and people were living in it already [laughs]. And we were still putting parts on the album.
On this new album, as in much of your past songs, the meaning of the some of the songs is very clear, while others are quite cryptic. Is it important for the meaning of a song to be clear?
Becker: I think, depending on what the song is and what it’s about, it’s more or less important that it have a very comprehensible narrative. And I think for example, a song like “What a Shame About Me” on the new record, I can’t imagine anyone having any trouble knowing what that’s about. Whereas a song like “Two Against Nature,” people ask us about quite a bit and sort of wonder about it. And particularly foreign people who are sort of confused about what might be meant by the idea of “Two Against Nature.” Or a song like “Gaslighting Abbie,” if you don’t know about the movie Gaslight and that expression, you’re screwed, right? You have no idea what that’s about. And yet if you do know that, then I think you can make sense out it.
Your use of the language and specific details, even when the meaning is not obvious, such as “now you’re the wonderwaif of Gramercy” from “Janie Runaway” are so great.
Becker: [Laughs] We certainly were pleased with that. Donald and I probably sat there for two hours trying to come up with that line. We had all different parts of the city. We had … Let me look at my file here. We write the lyrics with me typing words on the computer, and I end up keeping a lot of the stuff we don’t use. It just gets sort of dragged and dropped down at the end of the file.
Let’s see what I have — It says, “Another year of dog patch would have done you in.” [Laughs] Let’s see: “My waif queen,” “my waif supreme,” “waif mistress,” “the baroness of my Wall Street loft,” “now you’re the princess of Van Damme Street,” “Lispenard Street,” “Irving Place,” “Waverly Place.” We had the titles “Dixie Runaway,” “Susie Runaway,” “Polly Runaway,” “Molly Runaway,” “Annie Runaway.”
You’re famous for getting the tightest and most precise rhythm tracks possible. Since that innovation, people now have machines that can create that kind of precision, but they rarely get the soulful grooves that you get.
Fagen: Yeah, that comes out of the arrangement a lot. And the drummer. And in the last couple of years there has been a certain manipulation of the rhythm track.
You do manipulate the live drum tracks?
Becker: We may have manipulated it here or there.
But you do have live drums on every track?
Fagen: Yeah, I think we started with live drums on every song.
Becker: But then we edit. Essentially it’s an editing process.
Fagen: Yeah, it’s not only a live drum track, but actually a live band playing.
When you cut the basic tracks, do you do drums, bass guitar, and keys all at once?
Fagen: Yeah, we have a quintet or a sextet.
Becker: Some of the later ones we did with a trio.
With both of you playing together?
Becker: Sometimes. Sometimes on some of the larger sections I wouldn’t play.
Fagen: Walter was actually producing when we were having the bigger bands. I was sometimes playing outside, and Walter was inside, producing it.
Becker: Ordering takeout food. [Laughter]
Unlike most bands who develop a distinctive sound over a series of albums, you had your sound complete from the first album. Did you two discuss what you wanted to do, in terms of sound, before you accomplished it?
Fagen: We had been working at studios a little bit, and by the time we made the first record, we had met Roger Nichols, and Roger was also a hi-fi buff and had a very compatible concept, and certainly we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do. And Roger knew how to do it, essentially.
Becker: At that time there were a lot of engineers who were mysterious about what they did, and you couldn’t really talk to them or approach them. And they were sort of guarded or defensive, or had a certain proprietary attitude towards that aspect of the recording process. And Roger was totally into doing whatever we wanted to do in terms of experimenting. So we knew early on that he was the guy for us.
And you learned a lot about how to do it from him?
Becker: Absolutely. I think we also learned from Elliot [Shiner] and other engineers we had worked with in New York prior to that. But it was essentially working on the Steely Dan albums with Roger where we first had the opportunity to go in and fool around with things, and try different stuff, and play around with equipment, and mix a record, and so on.
Walter, you play more bass and guitar on this album than on previous Steely Dan albums.
Becker: The way we ended up working on things is that we were working for a while over in Hawaii and then over in Donald’s studio, and we were sort of doing everything at once, moving from track to track fluidly, and we’d get a track to a certain state where we were ready to do a bass part or do a guitar part, and I was just there, and so I ended up trying to do things and ended up doing more than what I would do otherwise.
Steely Dan is responsible for a certain evolution in songwriting and record making. Do you think songs will continue to evolve?
Becker: Absolutely. You might not like the direction they have evolved in, but rap does represent a very radical new style of songwriting. I think there absolutely is the possibility for songs to continue to evolve.
Fagen: The technology these days determines how things evolve. But you can say the recording process itself is a technology that contributed to the evolution of songwriting.
Becker: Writing also contributed to this evolution. Being able to write the song down.
Fagen: Technology is always involved with evolution.
“Jack of Speed” is one of the new songs that has a classic Steely Dan sound and groove. Is that title an idiom you created?
Fagen: Yeah, that one represents the personification of a kind of demonic obsession.
Becker: We just felt that “Good King Psilocybin” was too hard to sing [laughs]. So we decided to go with “Jack of Speed.”
You finished this album in 1999 to be released in 2000, which ensures that there will be good music in the next millennium. Any thoughts as to how your music applies to the next century?
Becker: Well, we’re still confused about how our music applies to the current century. [Laughs] We have been fortunate enough to do something that has always been out of the mainstream and yet have an audience for what we do. And I hope that continues to be true. I don’t think what we are doing fits neatly into the context of what’s happening now anymore than it did in the early ’70s when we started doing it. We were fortunate at that time that radio was as wide open as it was and that people doing something like what we were doing could sneak in there.
Fagen: We sneaked in a window of a couple of years when radio was willing to play something that didn’t sound like something that had been played for the last 40 years.
Will there be more Steely Dan albums after this one?
Becker: There could be. It depends on how long we live.
Fagen: Depends on the sales, really. They’re not going to let us make another one, you know, unless somebody buys it.
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