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 […]
Tag Archives | Recordings
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, […]
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 […]
Review of ‘Everything Must Go’
By Lary Wallace PopMatters.com As someone who’s always actively remained clear of the term “concept album” when discussing their own work, it’s ironic that Steely Dan (who, it should be noted, have never remained clear — actively or otherwise — of irony) would release, in the form of a summertime masterpiece, what is unmistakably and […]
Steely Message
A new album in a different world By Robert J. Toth For National Review Online The last time Steely Dan put out an album, Bill Clinton was in the White House, the Dow was north of 10,000, and the biggest global issue was what a yawner Y2K turned out to be. The record, their first […]
Tried and True or Being New
By Jon Pareles The New York Times It’s a rare band that can measure its history in decades, and for those that do, the choices don’t go away. Reinvention or refinement? Keep up with the latest or stick with what has worked before? Steely Dan, founded in 1972, and Metallica, founded in 1981, find their […]
QuickSpins: Everything Must Go
By Peter Kaufman Washington Post Steely Dan has glimpsed the apocalypse just ahead, and of course that puts the guys in a merry mood. “I move to dissolve the corporation / In a pool of margaritas,” suggests Donald Fagen on the title track of this new CD. On “Blues Beach,” a cheery-sounding boogaloo fit for […]
Dirty Old Dan
By Josh Tyrangiel Time Magazine Back in the primordial rock ooze of the late ’70s, Steely Dan wanted the world to think it was more wanton even than its extravagantly wanton rock peers. Judging from their blithely cynical and mordantly libidinous 1970s songbook, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were guys who would wait until the Eagles […]
