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 America.
“I guess that I am inured to bad news these days, although sometimes you have to do a double-take when you read that the vice-president has just fired a bullet into his friend while they are out hunting together,” says Fagen. “To me, that incident sums up everything you need to know about this presidency and why paranoia is everywhere. You can’t escape the environment we have created for ourselves, and, although I have never considered myself as being a particularly political animal, I don’t need a megaphone to tell people that we are invading the wrong countries, shooting the wrong people . . . living in a situation where everything the Bush administration does is wrong.”
At 58, and with a new CD, Morph the Cat, awaiting the public’s approval at the beginning of March, Fagen, one half of the renowned Steely Dan group – with Walter Becker – seems to have decided that fence-sitting is no comfortable position for a man whose IQ matches the number of chord changes in his songs. During the 1970s, the group’s brand of pop/funk music, allied to witty, arcane lyrics, burrowed into the consciousness of thinking music-lovers, as the duo were content to transcend the governance of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, engaged in Stakhanovite pursuit of the perfect guitar solo or keyboard phrase.
But now, Fagen has witnessed and heard enough, whether in the publication of new images of alleged abuse from Abu Ghraib, or the US’s failure to deal adequately with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to worry that silence too often equates with acquiescence.
His response is a systematic and withering attack on the “thuggish cult” he believes has hijacked America’s interests. It has reawakened the songwriting gifts that Fagen exhibited on his first solo recording, The Nightfly, now 25 years old.
“I suppose I feel more relaxed, musically, than I have ever done, because I have paid my dues and regained my enthusiasm and energy. There is so much going on in the world that it has never been more important to work hard to spread the message that we can change things, we can say to our leaders: ‘Enough is enough’ and we can force them to sit up and take notice,” he says.
“One of the songs on the new album, Mary Shut The Garden Door, was written after the Republican convention hit Manhattan and, although it’s ostensibly about an alien invasion, there are some similarities with those in power in America. I think that approach is better than making everything too obvious. Walter and I have grown used to combining catchy melodies with uneasy lyrics. Nothing has changed since we started out at the Brill Building in the early 1970s, except that we are a little older and a little less worried over what people might think of what we are doing.
“That’s why I am viewing this CD as the last part of a trilogy. The Nightfly was sort of looking at life from the standpoint of youth, Kamakiriad was more concerned with mid-life while this one is about endings, really.”
Fagen can afford to be flippant. Morph is feline groovy, Fagen’s vocal and keyboard skills masterfully complemented by sublime instrumental backing. He is poised to embark on his first solo tour Stateside, has begun preparations for another sojourn to Europe later this year, in Becker’s company, and has plenty of new material ready for the studio upon his return. If it is a belated flowering from somebody who used to suffer with writer’s block, Fagen isn’t complaining.
“It’s hard to pin down, but there would be tour dates when we were in our twenties, where the audience would be seriously quiet and I used to get paranoid and worry they were about to start flinging rotten tomatoes at us, which obviously wouldn’t have improved the atmosphere,” he says.
“Basically, this must have happened with a lot of pop stars – you reach a stage very early in your existence where you have seen your name splashed all over the media and you worry: ‘Jeez, how on earth am I ever going to surpass that?’ And you build up pressure on yourself.
“In the final analysis, I can’t control that. I have to do my best and trust my instincts and I am happy to believe I have matured as a writer. I like it when songs develop in some way and four
minutes usually isn’t sufficient time for something to develop musically. I’m still plugged into the Duke Ellington model, something akin to classical music, where you start with a theme, then expand on it, bit by bit, and veer off at tangents, and strive your utmost to book the listener on a mystery journey where he or she can’t quite guess the final destination and then, hopefully, they get caught up in the puzzle and stay on for the ride, because, when you get a decent groove going, time flies . . .”
Certainly, Morph the Cat doesn’t sound as if it lasts for almost 53 minutes, but, with this amount of diversity and bile in the mix, that isn’t surprising. “So if you ever see an automaton in a mid-price luxury car, better roll the sidewalks up, switch on your lucky star,” declaims Fagen on one song, briskly condemning the White House neo-cons who “came in under the radar, when backs were turned around”.
Bush-baiting has never sounded so good.
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