By Steve Morse
Boston Globe
Carlos Santana launched his comeback last year by using a fleet of famous guest stars, many of them young, on his ”Supernatural” album. No doubt more aging boomers will do the same — but an exception is Steely Dan, whose first studio album in 20 years keeps it all in the family. The two official members of Steely Dan — Walter Becker and Donald Fagen — steer their own course, while using non-big-name backup musicians with whom they’ve worked for a long time.
”I’ve never really liked the idea of cameo performances,” says Becker, referring to various ”star” turns. ”In most instances, they destroy the illusion of the work as originating from some particular point of its own. They sort of dilute things a little bit.”
Diluting things is popular in today’s fractured marketplace, where artists often try to reach as many radio formats as possible by importing stars to get them there. But Steely Dan has always been in it for art, not fame, which helps explain the title of its new CD, ”Two Against Nature,” due Tuesday. In honor of the CD release, PBS will telecast ”In the Spotlight: Steely Dan” on Friday. Steely Dan also plans to tour this year.
The album showcases its cerebral jazz-pop sound, cut with elegant doses of rock and funk, stitched together with luminous, and often wonderfully cynical, lyrics. All of which, in further explaining the ”Two Against Nature” title, is Steely Dan’s attempt to fight ”the way that life and human nature tend to settle for mediocrity, and how the aging process brings out various fears or a sense of timidity,” Becker says.
No one else sounds like Steely Dan, whose last original album was 1980’s ”Gaucho.” Becker and Fagen then took a break from each other, before touring successfully in the ’90s. But though they each released solo albums in the past decade, they took their time with a new disc because they didn’t want to return with a half-baked effort.
The new album marks a seamless transition from earlier Steely Dan records, updated with digital audio and grown-up lyrical themes. But there’s no Puff Daddy collaboration or other hip-hop nods, no departure into techno, no basic change of instruments. Guitars (Becker), keyboards (Fagen), and bass, drums, and horns are still featured, as they always were.
No radical departure
”We talked about all sorts of ways of conceiving the album — of using various themes or experimental approaches or weird instrumentations,” says Becker. ”We talked about stuff that would have been radical departures from what we’d done in the past, but in the end we just didn’t go that way. And I think it was a good call.”
As for Steely Dan’s breezy jazz-flavored pop, no one else is ”getting away with it these days,” Becker admits with a laugh. ”But we’ve always been interested in that kind of music. When I was a kid, I was always astounded at the lack of greater acceptance for jazz music in America. I’d say that all these years later, it’s only gotten worse. It’s just something that Don and I have always related to as sort of our primary source of musical roots, if you will. It’s just not part of the mainstream of the American musical culture at this point.”
The new album reflects the oblique, crazy-quilt world view shared by Becker and Fagen, ever since they were in Bard College in the late 1960s. Even the choice of the name Steely Dan was an eccentric one, since it stands for a phallic prop in the William Burroughs novel, ”Naked Lunch.”
Songs still off-center
The group has enjoyed a number of left-of-center hits through the years (”Deacon Blues,” ”Black Friday,” and ”Josie,” to name a few) and has more likable oddities on the new disc. The funky ”Cousin Dupree” is a picaresque tale of someone who has ”played a lot of nowhere gigs from keyboard man in a rockin’ ska band to haulin’ boss crude in big rigs.” And ”Almost Gothic” is about an infatuation with a woman who is ”pure science with a splash of black cat. … She’s almost gothic and I like it like that.” The protagonist concludes, ”I’m so excited I can barely cope/ I’m sizzling like an isotope.”
Rhyming cope with isotope? You might call it a typical Steely Dan invention.
”Yeah, well, we got a chuckle out of that one, too,” says Becker. ”That’s why we work together, essentially, because we’re stimulating to one another’s creative impulses.”
As for the musical end of the writing, he and Fagen tend to work separately, then bring in their bits to ”thrash them out.” But for lyrics, ”most were written with both of us in the same room with our thesauruses and computers and other aids.”
Thesauruses?
”Sure, rhyming dictionaries, thesauruses, why not?”
Offbeat lyrics abound, including the instantly classic line in the horn-flecked ”Janie Runaway” that ”you be the showgirl and I’ll be Sinatra way back in ’59.” But poignant lyrical twists also arise in a number of songs, as in ”What a Shame About Me” (a funk tune about a failed novelist who is ”three weeks out of the rehab, living one day at a time”) and ”West of Hollywood,” about a man who is ”way deep into nothing special.” The man meets a potential lover and tells her, ”Look in my eyes/Can’t you see the core is frozen? You can’t ask me to access the dreams I don’t have now.”
”We wrote many more songs than what we actually recorded,” says Becker, ”and we were able to write songs that reflected where we actually are in life and in our careers and in relation to the world at this point in time — without being really autobiographical.”
Becker and Fagen, who played with many of the members of their touring band in the studio, worked for 22 months straight to finish the album. That’s the hardest-working run of any of their albums, all because ”we were trying to meet a standard, or exceed a standard of work, that we had been able to accomplish in the past.”
In more practical terms, it’s also because they knew they had to complete it in time for a tour this spring and summer. And touring is what pleases Steely Dan as much as anything these days. They used to hate it in the ’70s (”we’ve moaned at length about that already,” says Becker) and went 19 years before starting up again in 1993.
Why so cheery about touring today?
”Well, we have a band that is consistent night to night, and is fun to play with,” says Becker. ”The venues are also nicer and the travel is much better organized. And we actually make money doing it, as opposed to losing money in the ’70s. The road is a whole new thing for us now.”
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