By Geoffrey Himes Washington Post How do you write a song about homeland security without sounding preachy or trite? On the other hand, how do you make honest music in 2006 without writing about homeland security? Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen solves this challenge on his terrific third solo album, Morph the Cat. He turns newspaper […]
Interview with Donald Fagen
By Chris Rolls MP3.com As the singing half of Steely Dan, Donald Fagen has injected a bohemian intellect into popular music for over 30 years. Back in 1982 Fagen released The Nightfly, a retro-futurist concept album chronicling adolescent fantasies about adult life. After a 10 year hiatus came the second installment in Fagen’s solo career, Kamakiriad, a […]
The cat will see you now
First there was ‘The Nightfly’. Then ‘Kamakiriad’. And now, a mere 24 years on, the trilogy is complete. the London Telegraph’s Robert Sandall meets Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen in New York to discuss the finer points of despair Slumped in a velvet armchair in the gaudily decorated “interview room” at his record label’s Manhattan HQ, […]
Donald Fagen Takes a Solo Shot
By Ken Micallef Boston Phoenix For a rock band who wrote songs about prostitutes, Eastern gurus, pedophilia, heroin, niece lust, Charlie Parker, and a post-apocalyptic world, Steely Dan have always had something akin to the last laugh. The duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker just have a knack for pulling the cultural wool over […]
At Long Last, Fagen Puts The ‘Cat’ Out
By Ira Robbins Special to Newsday Donald Fagen makes and releases solo albums on a timetable more familiar to comet-watchers than observers of pop’s hectic rush. Working in the off portions of Steely Dan’s four decades of on-and-off-again existence, the Grammy-winning singer-keyboardist from Passaic, N.J., has come up with three albums in 24 years, and […]
‘Morph the Cat’ Publicity Piece
From donaldfagen.com in connection with ‘Morph the Cat’ release Donald Fagen’s Morph The Cat is just your average soulful and sexy masterpiece about love, death and homeland defense. “There’s nothing sexier than the Apocalypse,” Fagen explains helpfully. “I suppose you could call this album Apocalypse Wow.” The darkly beautiful third solo effort from Fagen — […]
What Rhymes With Orange Alert?
By Fred Kaplan For The New York Times This is my death album,” Donald Fagen said in his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “It’s about the death of culture, the death of politics, the beginning of the end of my life.” Then he mock-sobbed, “Boo hoo hoo.” Mr. Fagen, best known as […]
Steely Dan’s Fagen Ready to Morph
By Jonathan Cohen Billboard Finding love in an airport security line, a ghostly feline hovering above New York and imaginary conversations with the late Ray Charles are not usual topics addressed in rock ‘n’ roll. But they’re prime subjects in the alternate musical universe of Steely Dan principal Donald Fagen, whose third album, Morph the Cat, […]
Review of Morph The Cat
By Andy Gill The Independent In an age when skilful PR hype and internet downloads have combined to shrink the gap between an artist’s first steps and their acclaim as Greatest Thing Ever to little more than a few nanoseconds, the appearance of a new Donald Fagen album serves to provide a little perspective, and […]
What Will the Cat Drag In?
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 […]
