By Kenji FujishimaPaste Magazine Published on Oct. 25, 2016 It’s been almost 40 years since Rolling Stone dubbed Steely Dan “the perfect musical antiheroes of the Seventies” in assessing the band’s sixth album Aja. But while the Walter Becker and Donald Fagen-led band named after a dildo in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch may seem more […]
Tag Archives | Recordings
Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho
Originally published on Oct. 6, 2016 By Paul Grimstad Paris Review The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He […]
40 Years Ago: Steely Dan Pulls Off ‘Royal Scam’
Originally published on May 31, 2016 By FRANK MASTROPOLO Ultimate Classic Rock Expectations were high when Steely Dan’s fifth album, The Royal Scam, was released May 31, 1976. It featured the band’s most cynical lyrics to date in its tales of outlaws, drug dealers and cheaters. While the LP reached No. 15 on the Billboard albums chart, its two singles, “Kid Charlemagne” […]
Steely Dan Essential Singles
By Ed Masley The Arizona Republic Jazz-loving soft-rock perfectionists Donald Fagen and Walter Becker topped some of the ’70s’ most sophisticated pop recordings with lyrical portraits of life on the dark side, casting a cynical eye with black humor and pathos on the American Dream as it was being acted out on a cocaine binge […]
Steely Dan’s Planet D’Sound Quality
SQ Logic: Our favorite audiophile-centric recording duo wax poetically on the necessary elements of great recordings. By Mike Mettler Sound+Vision Magazine With a score of dates set to go now on sale tomorrow today (4/26) for Steely Dan’s Mood Swings 2013: 8 Miles to Pancake Day summer/fall tour, I thought it only appropriate to revisit the time I’ve spent over the years with our […]
How did Steely Dan beat Eminem for 2000 Grammy?
By Charles Bright GoldDerby.com In recent years, one Grammy contest that has been misunderstood is Album of the Year in 2000, when ’70s jam-band Steely Dan’s “Two Against Nature” upset the heavily favored and extremely controversial Eminem for “The Marshall Mathers LP.” Their victory is usually thought of as simply the Recording Academy rewarding a […]
Glamour Profession: The Bassists of Donald Fagen’s Sunken Condos
By Chris Jisi Bass Player Magazine It remains one of the most exclusive and longest-running clubs in the sideman realm: cutting bass tracks for Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—either in their collective form, Steely Dan, or on their equally sophisticated solo CDs. What bassist wouldn’t want to join the likes of Chuck Rainey, Anthony Jackson, […]
How to Be an Aging Rocker
By Terry Teachout Wall Street Journal What does it mean to say that a work of art is “dated”? I know people who sincerely believe that Shakespeare’s plays are dated because of the way in which they portray women, a point of view that says far more about the complainants in question than it does […]
Donald Fagen’s Sunken Condos
By Fred Kaplan Stereophile Donald Fagen isn’t exactly a jazz musician, but he is a musician who plays jazz and whose music is suffused with a jazz sensibility, whether on his own or as co-leader of Steely Dan, so here we go. His 4th solo disc, Sunken Condos (on Reprise), is one of his […]
Donald Fagen Rises to New Heights with “Sunken Condos”
By Dennis Biles San Jose State Spartan Daily Grade: A Donald Fagen, co-founder of legendary rock group Steely Dan, may be getting up there in years but his slick musical style and witty, yet often sarcastic lyricism doesn’t sound dated at all on his latest solo effort “Sunken Condos.” By employing his usual method of […]
