By Elysa Gardner
USA Today
NEW YORK — Pop-music comebacks often play out like soap opera plots as artists confront everything from personal rivalries and failed romances to squabbles with former business associates.
By all indications, though, no such melodrama informs Two Against Nature, the first studio album in nearly 20 years from Steely Dan. It arrives in stores today.
Sitting in a recording studio in midtown Manhattan, principal members Walter Becker, 50, and Donald Fagen, 52, seem very much at ease with each other. That may owe something to their having toured together extensively and successfully throughout the past decade — a testament to the staying power of Steely Dan’s sophisticated, jazz-inflected pop songs, which in the 1970s seduced critics, serious music fans and mainstream audiences alike.
“After a couple of seasons of touring, we wanted to have new songs that we could play onstage,” Becker says. “So we decided we’d make a new album so that we could feel like we were doing more than just reliving the glory of the ’70s.”
Steely Dan spent most of those glory days off the road. In 1974, just as the group was achieving commercial prominence, Becker and Fagen decided to stop touring.
“It was mostly a reaction to circumstances — logistical problems, bad sound, strange venues, all sorts of things,” Becker says.
Similarly, Fagen attributes his and Becker’s decision to dissolve Steely Dan and focus on independent projects to weariness more than tension.
“We had been thrown together for a long time, and we were just kind of burnt out a bit at the end of the ’70s,” Fagen says.
“Who wasn’t?” Becker adds.
Like the band’s earlier material, the songs on Two Against Nature are at once catchy and complex, with lyrics that reflect Becker and Fagen’s dry, sometimes dark wit and their penchant for romantic intrigue and carnal longing.
The first single, “Cousin Dupree,” cheekily details lust for a close female relation. On another tune, “Gaslighting Abbie,” a man and his mistress devise a dastardly scheme for eliminating the wife problem. The May-December affair described in “Janie Runaway” makes the group’s 1980 hit “Hey Nineteen” sound like a treatment for a Walt Disney movie.
While both musicians insist that the murder plan laid out in Abbie is purely fictional (“There may have been accusations, but they’re false,” Fagen quips), Becker acknowledges that in writing, they draw “mostly our own imaginings and experiences and cravings. Humor has always been a big element of our writing. But we think that our songs show an endless admiration and fascination with women.”
“As you get older, you find you need beauty to keep you going,” Fagen says.
“There aren’t many people in popular music who acknowledge age as a factor,” he adds. “There’s kind of a perpetual adolescence that most pop bands seem to propagate.”
“We’re aware of the fact that we’re as old as we are, that we’re in this part of our lives,” Becker says. “I’m glad our songs reflect those facts — they should.”
On the other hand, Becker and Fagen acknowledge that they are attempting to crack a contemporary music scene dominated by youthful artists and attitudes. On a pop landscape that features Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, Limp Bizkit and Korn, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez, where, pray tell, does Steely Dan fit in?
“Way over there,” Becker says, pointing to the far end of the room.
“I’d say we’re in the vicinity of Jennifer Lopez,” Fagen counters, wistfully.
In any case, the musicians will not be leaving their prospects to fate.
After completing an American tour this summer, they hope to play dates
in Europe and Japan. Steely Dan also is using the promotional power of
television: The band will be the focus of an In the Spotlight special,
airing Wednesday on PBS, and an episode of VH1’s Storytellers,
premiering the last week of April.
Bill Flanagan, executive producer of Storytellers, feels that Steely Dan has the potential to attract both old and new fans — much as Carlos Santana did last year with his band’s highly successful comeback album, Supernatural.
“They’ve made a great record, and I think there are a lot of people who are waiting for the chance to see Steely Dan,” Flanagan says. “Whether they have the chance to break through to a teenage audience, to really young people, will depend on whether radio feels liberated enough by the success of Santana to break the silly restrictions they’ve sort of had on any act who’s been around long enough to grow facial hair.”
Becker says, “The easiest thing would probably be for the new Santana fans to just come over and check us out when they get tired of the Santana record.”
Fagen concurs. “In fact,” he says, “for anyone who’s disenchanted with the object of their fandom, we actually have a halfway house that you can go to. You can make a transition over to our camp.”
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