By Nui Te Koha
Sunday Times of Perth (Australia)
Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen hints that these days he is no longer the prickly character the band’s perfectionist demands once made him.
“I think Walter (Becker) and I were challenged when we were younger as far as relationships with other people,” he says. “I think we were both aware of that and got some humour from that into the tunes.
“Fortunately, we’ve come to terms with some of that as we’ve got older.”
A workaholic for most of his life, Fagen confesses his priorities have changed.
“From 20 years to 40 years, all I did was music,” he says. “I was either in the studio or playing live, thinking about music or composing.
“I don’t do that exclusively any more. I have a family and responsibilities and things are way different.” Fagen is married to musician Libby Titus.
Steely Dan recorded the elusive perfect album in 1977 – bona-fide classic Aja, featuring stellar tracks “Peg,” “Josie,” “Black Cow” and “Deacon Blues.”
“I just remember the tracks coming really easily on that one,” Fagen says.
“I think part of the reason it sounded different was that in the couple of years since we’d done the albums previous to that the studio musicians had changed the style they were playing. “They had stopped being work-a-day musicians in their attitude and started trying to do what they wanted. They became more independent.
“They could tell we wanted them to be themselves. And they knew we were looking for something different. Everything gelled right with that particular record.”
For the most part, Aja was narrated by the collective Steely Dan persona that Fagen and Becker invented to tell the stories in their songs. Fagen has described that character as unrepentant and a guy without a girl.
“We both have literary backgrounds,” he says, “so we wanted to have the songs tell stories, but use some of the subtleties in short stories.”
His solo work, however, is closer to home. In 2004, he released Morph the Cat, the final part of a trilogy that comprised The Nightfly (1982) and Kamakiriad (1993).
The first album dealt with youth, the second with midlife and the last with death. Fagen’s mother died in 2003, and he was fascinated by the tensions and paranoia haunting New York after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Fagen says that when Steely Dan tour Australia for the first time, in September, the set list will skew to classics, deeper cuts and solo work.
Are these pedantic recordings hard to replicate live?
“We don’t try to make them sound like the record exactly,” he says. “Many of them will sound recognisable and we try to open them up for improvisation. There’s a certain curve to a tune that lends itself to playing around with the arrangement.”
That was always their aim when creating music. “We come out of a jazz tradition, a modern jazz tradition,” he says. “There was never any question we were going to work for anybody. We were just doing what we wanted to do.”
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