By Abigail Prendergast DigitalJournal.com Steely Dan lead singer and keyboardist, Donald Fagen is set to release latest solo work, “Sunken Condos” on Oct. 16. The first single from it, “I’m Not The Same Without You,” is being considered some of his best work yet. Steely Dan frontman, Donald Fagen’s fourth solo studio album, Sunken Condos, will be […]
Tag Archives | Morph the Cat
‘The Nightfly’ Still Lives at 25
By Robert J. Toth The Wall Street Journal One of pop music’s sneakiest masterpieces has turned 25. Often, an album rises from regular best-seller to classic status because it captures the temper of its times. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” for instance, simply sounds like 1967, trippy and disarrayed. But “The Nightfly,” the 1982 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Review: ‘Morph the Cat’
By Melissa Ruggieri Times-Dispatch Staff Writer RICHMOND, Va. — At his best, Donald Fagen is a peculiar curmudgeon, a sort of mad scientist mixing up elements of jazz, funk and pop and somehow making them stick. That Fagen, the one so prominent on his first two solo albums, 1982’s The Nightfly and 1993’s Kamakiriad, is the kind […]
Donald Fagen on His New Album
After Steely Dan closed up shop in the early 1980s, Donald Fagen went solo with The Nightfly, an album which became an instant and timeless classic. Now a mere 24 years later he has finished his semi-autobiographical trilogy with the release of Morph The Cat. By Andy Gill The Independent NEW YORK — In the […]
