From Burroughs to Berry, duo has had wide range of influences By STEVE KNOPPER Special to the Journal Sentinel Trying to sum up Steely Dan’s 34 years of musical and literary influences is like trying to translate “Pretzel Logic.” It’s an overwhelming task. Even as Bard College students in the late 1960s, musicians Walter Becker […]
Donald Fagen: Morph the Cat
By Woodrow WilkinsAllAboutJazz.com There’s an engaging quality to Donald Fagen’s songwriting and perfectionism that makes Steely Dan fans flock to his solo albums. While The Nightfly (1982) and Kamakiriad (1993) were expressly Fagen, Morph the Cat closely resembles Steely Dan without Walter Becker. The lineup partially reflects the ensemble that recorded the Dan’s 2003 release, Everything Must Go, and toured with the […]
Review: Donald Fagen Concert
By Richard Cromelin Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES — The first song in Donald Fagen’s show on Monday at the Wiltern LG was a pretty good clue that this first solo tour by the Steely Dan principal would be neither a greatest-hits joyride nor an infomercial for his new solo album, Morph the Cat, the […]
Who Is Morph the Cat?
By Fred Kaplan Slate It doesn’t happen often, but whenever Steely Dan — or one of its leaders, Donald Fagen or Walter Becker — comes out with a new album, the band’s more obsessive fans pore over the lyric sheets like a squad of Yalie lit crits, scrambling to decipher the cryptic allusions. They’re the most […]
Donald Fagen – Morph the Cat
By John Henry Audiophile Audition Now here’s an artist who hasn’t given up on DVD-Audio, and including with it not only both Dolby Digital and DTS options, but also a separate CD – the best all-around approach to “DualDisc” as far as we’re concerned. If the CD changer in my car weren’t on the fritz […]
Influences: Donald Fagen
Steely Dan was the quintessential L.A. band, but Fagen himself has always been a New Yorker at heart. By Ben Williams New York Magazine Were you inspired by anything new when you recorded your new album, Morph the Cat? I basically listen to the same 40 albums that I listened to in high school, near […]
Fagen Keeps His Cool
By Tom Lanham San Francisco Chronicle NEW YORK — For the past 35 years, with his smooth-jazz outfit Steely Dan, Donald Fagen has cultivated an ice-blue, cocktail-hour profile that’s always been several notches classier than whatever rock was happening at the time. Ditto for his three solo albums — 1982’s The Nightfly, 1983’s Kamakiriad and […]
Fagen Delivers NY in ‘Morph the Cat’
By Jeffrey Lee Puckett Louisville Courier-Journal Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat is a series of fanciful Manhattan snapshots primarily connected by Fagen’s dry wit, uptown rhythm & blues and a curious fascination with death. It isn’t a narrative, by any means, but more like an envelope of photos found on a sidewalk, as evocative as they […]
Fagen’s Steel Somewhat Blunted but a Crowd-Pleaser Still
By Ricardo Baca Denver Post DENVER — Steely Dan co-frontman Donald Fagen was supposed to play the Paramount Theatre on Tuesday night, but his trucks got stuck on snowy Nebraska highways. Fagen was forced to postpone until Wednesday, when the sold-out crowd warmed him and his band from the cold outside with a display of […]
This isn’t Steely Dan, and There Ain’t No ‘Fagen’ It
By Devin Grant Charleston Post and Courier Morph The Cat Donald Fagen Reprise On the rare occasion that Donald Fagen decides to bless the music world with a solo release, it is cause for celebration among fans of his (also occasional) outfit, Steely Dan. You see, Fagen’s solo outings might as well be Steely Dan […]
