By Richard Cromelin Los Angeles Times In returning Steely Dan to the pop music world after a two-decade intermission, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have transformed the group from a shrouded enigma into a fan-friendly, interactive entity — relatively speaking, anyway. And they’ve done it without losing much of their subversive edge. All these threads […]
Becker, Fagen Return as Steely Dan
By Roger D. Friedman New York Observer When Steely Dan was last a major part of the pop music marketplace, it was the summer of 1980, and their final hit — “Hey, Nineteen,” about an older guy dating a young girl who shares none of his cultural references, like Aretha Franklin — was wedged into […]
Review: ‘Two Against Nature’
By Brian Q. Newcomb St. Louis Post-Dispatch It’s taken Donald Fagen and Walter Becker 20 years to make another Steely Dan studio album, and two decades notwithstanding, it’s as if they haven’t skipped a beat. Amid the band’s trademark pristine jazz-influenced pop formulations, it’s not surprising to find lyrics that suggest the state of their […]
BBC Online Chat
BBC Host Welcome to the Steely Dan Live Chat, with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen joining us live from the US. We’ll be chatting tonight about the chequered history of one of the most important and intelligent bands the US has produced. You can ask your own question by typing in the box at the bottom […]
The Band With 2 Brains
Twenty Years after their last hit, proto-cool studio wizards Steely Dan emerge from a deep freeze. By Jeff Gordinier Entertainment Weekly The two guys from Steely Dan are staring at a vegetarian menu. They look like they’ve just been handed a medical textbook written in Urdu. ”I wonder what Zen ravioli is,” Donald Fagen muses. […]
Review: ‘Two Against Nature’
By Chris Willman Entertainment Weekly Steely Dan’s reunion album Two Against Nature is a preternatural enough stylistic reprise that it won’t inspire a whole lot of conversions. If you already hate Steely Dan, you’ll view Donald Fagen and Walter Becker as regular Rip van Winkles, still as unconscionably slick as the day they dozed off. […]
Do It Again, Steely Dan
By Neal McGarity Hartford Courant Two Against Nature Steely Dan Giant Records More an evolving musical concept than a group, Steely Dan enjoyed unlikely success in the hard-rock ’70s by smoothly blending jazz and rock on meticulously produced albums loaded with lyrical cynicism. Singer/keyboardist Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker — working with a revolving […]
Steely Dan Retreats to 1980
By Ty Burr Entertainment Weekly Like a mellow, jazz-bo Frankenstein monster, it shambles out of the swamp of Baby Boomer Lite-FM nostalgia, brandishing tasty horn charts and plinging guitar solos, seemingly none the worse for having been frozen in ice for two decades, still devoid of a pulse yet somehow shuffling onwards… It’s the new […]
Aja-vu All Over Again
Twenty Years Later, Becker and Fagen Find the Steely Dan Formula Works Well By Larry Katz Boston Herald Say you’re a member of a bigtime rock band from the ’70s. Say you’re recording your first album of new material in 20 years. What in the name of Santana do you do to update your sound? […]
Walter Becker: Reelin’ in the Gear
By Ken Micallef Guitar.com In the history of ’70s rock the guitar solos of Steely Dan loom large. On such albums as Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, Royal Scam and Aja, the odd-looking masterminds — guitarist/bassist Walter Becker and singer/keyboardist Donald Fagen — found ways to coax blistering performances out of bored session guitarists who had […]
