...from Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

An interview done by the editor of MIX Magazine himself, George Peterson
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Steely Dan 'Everything Must Go'

by George Petersen

Aug 1, 2003 12:00 PM



It seems like only yesterday that we gazed through the glass at Two Against Nature, the landmark comeback album for Steely Dan. Now, danmeisters Donald Fagen and Walter Becker — the enigmatic showbiz kids who consistently broke all the rules to create some of the coolest mainstream cult-pop on the planet — continue their ongoing tradition with the band's latest release, Everything Must Go.

The album was recorded in a matter of months — an astonishing feat for a band previously known for releasing albums that took years to complete — yet Everything Must Go is strengthened by the experience. For this release, the Dan actually cut live, basic tracks with a real band rather than with sonic-assemblage techniques, using dozens of session players and scrupulously replaced sounds. And for a band hailed for their forays into cutting-edge technologies, Everything Must Go is in many ways a return to their roots, with tight, hook-laden songs recorded with the warmth of tape and a vibe that evokes the best of Steely Dan's earlier works.

Everything Must Go includes a number of elegant touches. Becker returns to play bass with the band and steps up with overdubbed guitar solos on five of the nine tracks. And for the first time since his brilliant — but critically ignored — 11 Tracks of Whack solo album (1994), we actually hear Becker sing, marking his SD vocal debut on “Slang of Ages,” with its trés cool “Spill the Wine”-style groove.

Everything Must Go is a stronger album than the Dan's quadra-Grammy™ Award-winning Two Against Nature. The production is more relaxed and natural-sounding; overall, the songs are better crafted, creating a more consistent package. And like other Becker/Fagen creations, Everything Must Go doesn't immediately grab one by the throat, but after a couple of plays, the infectious hooks on tunes such as “GodWhacker,” “Pixeleen,” “Things I Miss the Most” and the two single pulls (“The Last Mall” and “Blues Beach”) are firmly locked into the listener's consciousness.

Thanks to the magic of $1.49/song downloads, the singles were made available a month before the album's official release, and thousands of eager SD fans responded to the call. This, of course, was followed by a deluge of Internet postings by fans who endlessly debated the meanings (and/or actual wordings) of the lyrics. Speaking of the release, Everything Must Go simultaneously came out on CD-Audio, DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and in a European limited release on 12-inch vinyl.

In his January 2003 Mix interview, Everything Must Go engineer Elliot Scheiner spoke briefly about the project, but for more details, we talked to Becker and Fagen, who offered their insights into the new release.



What was your overall direction for Everything Must Go?
Fagen: We were trying to stretch our apocalyptic aspect a little further than it's been for a while. This is a good time for that, with us being in the early 21st century and all that.


The Nightfly focused on the past. This one's focused on the future.
Fagen: In a certain way. This is the security century, which brings up a whole host of fears. Fears and desires…


Haven't those been recurring Steely Dan themes?
Fagen: It has, but somehow, this time it seems to have crystallized in 2003. It feels like the century's chasing us, like having a hellhound on your trail.


Well, hopefully we're not all heading into “The Last Mall.”
Fagen: Hopefully not, but these are the fears that need to be expressed. People are usually afraid to say what's on their mind.


Everything Must Go sounds like a return to the classic Steely Dan sound of old. For example, “Blues Beach” has kind of a “My Old School” vibe.
Becker: I hadn't thought of that before, but I can see why you'd say that.

Fagen: It has kind of a frat house feel…

Becker: …a rollicking, major-key, playful cadence and feel to it.


Where did you record the album?
Becker: We tracked at Sear Sound in New York, did most of the overdubs at Skyline Studios in New York, and other overdubs were done at my place in Hawaii and at Sear. We mixed at Presence Studios in [Westport] Connecticut.


Did Elliot Scheiner do all of the tracking and mixing?
Fagen: He did only tracking and mixing.

Becker: We had other engineers — Roger Nichols, T.J. Doherty and Dave Russell — who work at my studio in Maui.

Fagen: You know, there was a George Russell, an Irish poet who went by the pretentious pen name AE…

Becker: Is that true?

Fagen: Yes, and there was also the great jazz composer George Russell, who also wrote the Lydian theory of chromatic tonal organization.


The tracking was with a live band in one room?
Becker: The basics for each track were cut in one day with the band.

Fagen: All of our guys actually sat in a room together and played, like an old-fashioned band.


That's an amazingly advanced concept!
Becker: We thought so.

Fagen: It's also the technique of the future. “There's no time like the future to get something done,” as Robert Heinlein once said.


And rightly so! But who's in the band this time?
Fagen: On drums, it was Keith Carlock. Hugh McCracken and John Herrington played electric guitars, Walter played electric bass, I played electric or acoustic piano, Ted Baker played keyboards, too.

Becker: On one occasion, when Ted was out of the country, jazz musician Bill Charlap came in as the second piano player.


After years of working in digital, Everything Must Go marks your return back to analog.
Becker: We went forward to analog!

Fagen: Analog is the medium of the future!

Becker: We ended up using analog because we started working at Sear Sound and we loved the studio so much and they only had analog machines there.

Fagen: Walter Sear, the studio owner, is deeply into gear you might call “retro,” but since it never really went out, how could it be retro?


After putting the basics down, did you go to a workstation environment for overdubs and editing?
Becker: We then went to Sony PCM-3348HR…

Fagen: [sings blues] I went down to the workstation. I walked down to the workstation!

Becker: With an occasional foray into a workstation. Most of the time, we…

Fagen: [continues to sing the blues] And met my Jesus there…

Becker: And met my digital Jesus there.

Fagen: This connects to some of that “GodWhacker” material.

Becker: This is a sort of theological…


Existentialism?
Fagen: Essentialism, really…

Becker: So where were we?


I was asking about workstations.
Becker: We did all of the work recording overdubs on the Sony machine.


Elliot is a big Nuendo fan. Were the workstation parts done in that or Pro Tools?
Becker: We've worked in Pro Tools in the past, and I had never worked in Nuendo. And although Elliot kept telling us how great Nuendo was, there were Pro Tools systems everywhere, so we did some work in Pro Tools.


So did the analog recording account for Everything Must Go's smoother sound?
Becker: It's partly analog, partly fortuitous and partly Elliot. He's got taste, and what he does is very distinctive.


What format did you mix to?
Becker: We came out of the Neve [at Presence] and went to analog tape and also to an Alesis Masterlink, fed by some high-res outboard converters.


Did you record 15 or 20 songs or just nine?
Becker: We had two good tracks left over, along with some partial songs and false starts…

Fagen: One was too slow and draggy. The other was too fast.


How is that you guys manage to keep such a consistent sound using so many musicians in different studios during the years?
Becker: By now, the new musicians have heard all of our old records and they fall right into it.


Part of that consistency comes from the horn parts and arrangements. Who did them?
Fagen: I do them, but Walter helps, as well. I used to listen to a lot of Oliver Nelson records in the '60s, and I like Thad Jones' arrangements, but really it's homemade. I never really studied horn arranging, so I just make it up.


So you go into the studio with all of the finished charts written up?
Fagen: Pretty much; sometimes, we do a little rewriting in the studio, but I write them out in advance, with the voicing and general layout.


Does that also apply to backup vocals and harmonies?
Becker: A lot of those are just done all at once. We figure them out on the piano in the studio. We usually use close-voicing, like everybody else in the rock 'n' roll world, but as the chords are more interesting, we get some interesting dissonances.


On Everything Must Go, Walter's back to playing bass. It's kind of a return to the old Steely Dan days.
Becker: Yeah. It was a real flashback and I'd almost forgotten how much fun it was to play the bass and what a great job it is to play bass in a band full of great players. Actually, the reason I stopped was back in the L.A. days in the '70s, the players were getting a little too hot for me. I remember sitting in a room playing with Jim Gordon and Michael Omartian and Dean Parks, and I realized that someone else should be sitting in that chair, and his name was Chuck Rainey. Nowadays, Chuck lives in Dallas, so I've been playing the bass again, and what we're trying to do musically is a little different, so it lends itself to me playing bass again. I loved doing it. It was great.


On “Slang of Ages,” we finally hear Walter Becker singing on a Steely Dan album.
Becker: For years, I've been offering to sing a song, knowing full well that I'd avoid it at all possible costs. And due to the range difference between Donald and myself, I could never sing on one. But on the track we'd cut for “Slang of Ages,” the verse was a free verse and I could sing the chorus melody down one octave, so I could actually sing a song that had been meant with Donald in mind.


This whole thing was an accident?
Becker: It was originally meant for Donald, but when we got down to it, I realized I could sing it and felt I should do a share of the work, because singing is a huge proportion of the studio time. Another way that “Slang of Ages” was suited more to me than Donald was because it doesn't have a written melody for the verse and Donald doesn't like doing songs that are like that. I ended up doing it because I could, and I should if I could.


Will there be more Walter Becker vocals on the next album?
Becker: Not if I can help it, because Donald is a much better singer than me. His style and his range and approach is a large part of the band's characteristic sound. He's the frontman; I'm the guy behind the guy.


What are some of your feelings about surround sound and high-res release formats?
Becker: Regarding surround sound, I know musicians too well to want them behind my back. But because of the additional speaker separation, the surround mixes I've worked on can make 2-channel sound somewhat low-fi by comparison. But I still prefer stereo overall. The music holds together better.

It's funny, but as the sonics improve, the focus on music doesn't improve. For example, there are a lot of ways to record piano, and a lot of people do much better piano recordings than Rudy Van Gelder ever did. But when you listen to a Van Gelder piano recording, you're listening to the sound of the guy's piano and the notes in his solo. When you listen to more hi-fi recordings of pianos, you might hear more high-end detail and clarity, but you may be listening more to the overtones of the piano and less focused on the intention of the musician, which is in the fundamental pitches of the notes, rather than the often-clangorous overtones.


That's one thing I've noticed with a lot of modern musicians who are sometimes more concerned with the sound of the patch or setting than the overall performance. If you sat Ray Charles down on a Rhodes piano, magic could happen. And if you sat Chick Corea down in front of that same piano, it's a completely different — yet wonderful — sound.
Becker: I remember going to a concert at Hunter College when I was a teenager in New York. There was a jazz pianist named Billy Taylor — who was also a promoter and DJ — and he had a show with himself, Mary Lou Williams and Thelonious Monk. One after another, they sat down and played the same piano and it was amazing how different the piano sounded. In fact, when Monk played, it didn't even sound like a piano anymore! It's the same with guitar, drums and anything else. I think that's one of the unfortunate by-products of the fascination with and proliferation of technologies now: It's essentially a distraction from music and its fundamental aesthetic considerations.


Everything Must Go must be one of your fastest album productions ever.
Fagen: We're not getting any younger…

Becker: …And we don't want our next album to be finished by our estates!


We're almost out of time. Do you have anything else to add?
Fagen: Don't buy a hat through the mail!


http://mixonline.com/reco...verything/
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tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Aja - From the drummer's perspective.

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1977: Aja

Aja is the most popular of all the Steely Dan recordings. Four of its seven tracks were radio hits with a broad spectrum of appeal. Musicians had a field day with the title track, which had powerful solos from Wayne Shorter and Steve Gadd. Gadd, it seems, was the ultimate foil for the Dan's demanding assault on a musician's psyche. For 'Aja' he sightread the entire seven-minute chart perfectly, solo and all, by the second take. An article at the time quoted Fagan as saying, "I was stunned. No one had ever done anything like that before. I couldn't believe it."

Once again, the new record surpassed the expectations of their legion of fans, each song a fully realized world unto itself. 'Black Cow,' with its silly chocolate bar subject, was gently nudged along by former Lawrence Welk drummer Paul Humphrey. (Humphrey's group, the Cool Aid Chemists, had a soul hit in I97l) The laid-back Southern aroma of "Deacon Blues" featured Purdie. The incredibly catchy "Peg" featured a fiery, sassy drum track from Marotta. "Home At Last" showcased the classic Purdie shuffle, supporting a sad tale of remorse and fear. "I Got The News," a dotted-l6th-note bounce-fest that sounds like early hip-hop, was Ed Greene's only track for the Dan. And "Josie," the story of the welcome shown returned a town prostitute, is Jim Keltner's minimalist tour de force of taste and style. With it's perfect balance of memorable songs, outrageously superb performances, and immaculate production, Aja is Steely Dan's masterpiece.

"When I first heard 'Josie' back I didn't like it," said the ever-sunglassed bandito. "It was a funny groove. It was such an odd song, especially for that time. In retrospect, I love the sound of it, the feel. Fagen had been through full sessions with other drummers for the same song. He was such a commanding musical figure, you knew that when he told you to play a little figure, you'd better play exactly what he wanted. That was a lot of pressure on me at the time, but I relished the musicality of it. I concentrated heavily. It was a five page chart with no repeat signs.

"As for that fill near the end, it was a bar of 7/8. That's definitely not something that I would've played. That figure was written on the paper, it was totally Fagen's thing: I wish I could get a copy of that chart. I've had more drummers ask me about that lick. I was playing a 5x14 Ludwig Vistalite snare drum, a Super Sensitive---weird instrument.

"Later, they wanted me to overdub something over the breakdown, but they didn't know what. The beauty of those guys is that they truly wanted something weird. So I played this garbage can lid with rivets in it that I'd been given for Christmas. They liked the way it sounded, so it became a part of the song."

Though Keltner cut "Peg," his track didn't make the final pick. "You do have an advantage in a way, if you come in behind someone else. The writers have already been through the song, and they have a better handle on what they want. I didn't do a good job on 'Peg,' it just didn't work."

Consequently, Rick Marotta's take on "Peg" was the one Becker and Fagen went with. "Chuck Rainey and I got into this groove that was really unstoppable," Marotta recalls. "We had this groove for the verses, and then the chorus came and everything just lifted. It just went that way every time. Everything was just working - my hands, my feet - it was just one of those days. On 'Peg,' I could hear every single nuance that I had played, as well as what everyone else had played. What amazed me was how they could mix those records like that. You could hear everything perfectly. The snare on that song is an old wooden Ludwig with Canasonic heads. It used to be Buddy Rich's drum."

http://www.granatino.com/...d1.htm#aja
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tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Kool! Thanks for Those , tA! Yup, I remember Marotta also talking about those Nuances on the Aja DVD--- that at that time, you just didn't hear those nuanced things on most records being made back then...I can see why most Cream of the Crop musicians wanted a crack at a Steely Dan session...



...

paligap said:

I'm sure most were. I got to speak with James Gadsden some years ago and he was a bit miffed.
It seems that he recorded a drum track and they erased everything but the snare/hi-hat.
Another drummer came in a recorded the rest of the kit. Can't remember the tune he was talking about.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Making your guitar Mu (µ) - Denny Dias

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We are painfully aware of the fact that even the most lucid explanations of simple musical ideas re by themselves meaningless to the rare guitar player who may be willing to expand his conception and technique. Through years of bitter experience, working with our own rock and roll orchestra, we have come to know that the noble savage armed with a screaming Stratocaster or a vintage les Paul, if he is to be made to understand, must be addressed in the peculiar language associated with his chosen instrument. In many cases, even this is not enough; and a "brother" (another guitarist) must be brought in to translate and hopefully, to ease the sometimes nasty relationship that tends to develop between the well-meaning, earnest, highly trained composer/musician and the pragmatic, possibly bisexual, guitar player. For these reasons, we now pass the pen to a first line guitarist and colleague, , Mr. Denny Dias, who should be well known to you all, and who studied for many years with Downbeat and Metronome Poll Winner of the Fifties, Mr. Billy Bauer. (non-guitarists may skip the following section.)


Hi! I'm really glad to be writing this part of the music book because it took me years and years to get the hang of these funny chords and I figure I can save a lot of people a lot of time. The reason it took me so long is because I had to figure it out for myself. Walter knows some oaf these chords but always seems to have his hand on the wrong fret or something, and Donald is, as my girlfriend Debbie puts it, "the worst guitar player I ever heard." So they wouldn't be much help. These µ major chords aren't easy to play on the guitar, believe me, but once I realized that my playing wouldn't really cook with the band until I could play them, without thinking, and all the keys and in any position, I got my stuff together pretty fast. What I'm putting down here is a complete rundown of the µ major chords I use in my playing. Even Billy Bauer probably didn't know some of these.

Here's the first µ major chord:



Strum this one a little and get used to the sound. Compare it to an E major chord


And see if you can hear the difference. Now by playing this same voicing on the fifth fret,



you get an A µ major chord, and you can play the right µ major chord for any tonic note by starting with that note on the low E string (6th string), barring across that entire fret, and making this voicing with whatever fingers you have left. This next chord has its tonic on the 5th (A) string.




The same chord but as a bar chord.




Here's another one.




Relax your left hand for three minutes, then try this one.




The same voicing barred (good luck).




Those of you with jazz chops may like this 4-string chord with a major third on the bottom.




I guess that's all of them. What you have to do is practice these chords until you get so good that you can automatically substitute the right µ major chord voicing for any major triad in the Steely Dan Songbook, or whatever they're going to call it, without thinking. How do you know which voicing is the right now? Usually I use the one that's easiest to get to from where I am on the neck so I don't have to move my hand back and forth a lot, especially when it's humid like Hicksville, or hot and dry like Woodland Hills. Usually that's the way I do it, even in some of the real jazz sessions I've been playing. But, in the studio or on the road, Donald and Walter will make me play a µ major chord that's real high or real awkward or something and I'm never sure why they want that particular one--but they have the final decision. I guess you can choose any one you want, because how are they going to know about that?


Thank you, "Brother" Dias. I suppose it's only fair to warn you people that lately we have been visiting many of the excellent nightclubs and discotheques all around the country without prior notification and, if you're up on the bandstand playing an unaesthetic voicing of the µ major chord in, say, Rikki or Reelin in the Years, we're going to notice the minute we walk in and so will anybody else with half an ear (nice try, Denny). So tighten up.


http://www.steelydan.com/songbook.html
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tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Some interesting observations on Steely Dan from a 2K article (The Village Voice)

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Doing It Again
Steely Dan Two Against Nature
by Robert Christgau
March 8 - 14, 2000


In 1980, topping off the active phase of their strange career as pop interlopers turned AOR powerhouses, Steely Dan scored their third and final Top 10 hit: "Hey Nineteen," in which a class-of-'67 "dandy of Gamma Chi" came on to a girl too young to remember Aretha Franklin. As music, it was smoothly seductive, all tasty off-harmonies and jazz-lite pulse. As seduction, however, it was slightly sickening—half whine, half bribe. Lamented singer and lyricist Donald Fagen: "She thinks I'm crazy/But I'm just growing old." Fagen was 32 at the time.

Shortly thereafter, Fagen and his chum Walter Becker showed just how old they felt by retiring. They'd always hated the rock life anyway—not just touring, the whole mess of having a band. Holing up for months diddling sonic details they dug, but not the interpersonal stuff. Having bestowed upon us two Doobie Brothers and a clean-cut blond vocalist who was never heard from again, they abandoned all pretensions to collective camaraderie by contracting out the priciest studio guns in El Lay—swinging perfectionists from the Crusaders to Toto, typified for me by pet guitarist Larry Carlton, who can say nothing with more taste and dexterity than any alleged jazzman ever to lick his chops. But if you want to blame Carlton for 1977's Aja, the band's blandest and most commercially decisive album, you'll have to explain how come he's all over Fagen's wonderful 1982 The Nightfly. Steely Dan is Fagen and Becker—everyone else is an instrument. They need snazzy ones because they specialize in chords most rock and rollers can't play. So rock covers of their perverse low-life lyrics and scrumptious melodies are almost nonexistent. But Doc Severinsen did one once, and next time you're stuck in an elevator, keep your ears peeled. Muzak loves these guys.

Muzak has no doubt helped keep them flush since 1981, along with songwriting and production work, sampling royalties, a grand total of three solo albums, and the two tours they ventured in the '90s. But for 20 years Fagen and Becker have lived primarily off their small, lovingly tended catalog of sound recordings: seven albums, a few compilations, and in 1993 a meticulously remastered box, Citizen Steely Dan, that rather than dangling the usual add-on dreck upheld their sonic principles by making room for just four nonalbum cuts, only one previously unreleased—and that has since been surpassed, for reasons they'll happily detail, by the reremastered single albums they put out later. Their exacting, articulate, affluent cult is loaded with audiophiles as well as supporting schools of exegetes who'll go to their graves pondering the hidden meaning of "Brooklyn owes the charmer under me."

And in this new millennium the exegetes finally have something new to dissect, because for the first time since 1980's dispirited Gaucho Steely Dan has finalized some new material: an album called Two Against Nature, not a bad slogan for a matched pair of urban cynics. There's nothing expedient, rote, or stillborn about this return to the racks. As a Steely Dan fan from the moment the vicious cycle that is "Do It Again" snuck onto AM radio in 1972, I hear it as almost a rebirth, closer in mood to the elitist effrontery of their first four albums than the accomplished slickness that gradually took over. But it's different from both, as after 20 years it had better be. The music turns Aja's fusion-pop mode jumpier and snappier, sourer and trickier and less soothing—postfunk, whether anyone will admit it or not. Even more important, the impenetrable lyrics have moved decisively toward the literal. Sure, you can debate the precise meaning of "Who makes the traffic interesting?"; they're doing it in the chat rooms right now. But Two Against Nature is so thematically unified it almost has a concept, one familiar to admirers of "Hey Nineteen"—and a dandy for a rock comeback, too. Clearly and explicitly, Two Against Nature is an album about old men trying to get laid.

Rocking past your prescribed time doesn't oblige you to feign "youth," especially if you weren't so crazy about either rock or youth to begin with. But for damn sure the possibility is going to occur to you. And now that Fagen and Becker have passed 50 it becomes clear that they have a unique solution to this problem. Thrown together, they're permanent college boys, tied to the roots of their relationship at small, arty, expensive Bard. The bull-session one-upsmanship of their synergy suggests nothing so much as a less slapstick version of National Lampoon, which was very much a reflection of the same '60s worldview (meaning early '60s worldview) the solo Fagen celebrated—rather more lyrically than he ever gets with Becker—in The Nightfly. And they're premature pseudosophisticates to this day. Their cynicism, their obscurantism, their compulsive cleverness, their devotion to agreed-upon totems of musical cool—all are hallmarks of the kind of bond that develops between too-smart sophomores who aren't as sure of themselves as they pretend to be, especially around women.

There are nine songs on the new album. In the relatively cryptic opener, loosely based on an old Ingrid Bergman flick, hubby and "ripe and ready" new flame drive wife crazy by the sea. Then a fortysomething clerk at the Strand doesn't have the gumption to go home with the movie star he went out with in college. Then the title tune, about voodoo, the exception to the theme. Then a painter rejuvenated by jailbait Janie angles for a three-way with her friend Melanie. Then a sloe-eyed Little Eva of Bleecker Street has our protagonist "sizzling like an isotope." Then he's saving a honey from a speed freak, sex just a subtext in this one. Then Dupree gets turned down by his all-grown-up little cousin Janine in the most savory lines of the record: "She said maybe it's the sleazy look in your eyes/Or that your mind has turned to applesauce/The dreary architecture of your soul/I said—but what is it exactly turns you off?" Then another mercurial narcissist jerks our man around. And finally a hot affair between Kid Clean and Anne de Siecle slips "below the horizon line"—apparently into therapy, which the Kid apparently needs big time. Do you still think I'm making this concept stuff up?

OK, not concept—that was the silly sci-fi of Fagen's Kamakiriad. Say instead that sex here is somewhere between controlling metaphor and shared obsession. The likelihood that the songs are fictions, based like most fictions on observation—the music business is a petri dish for such stories—doesn't mean they aren't also fueled, like most fictions, by personal experience. But who knows whose autobiography ended up where? Certainly not us exegetes. Although convention attributes all Steely Dan lyrics to Fagen, whose solo albums are far more literary than the plainspoken Becker confessional 11 Tracks of Whack, Becker is plenty verbal—his 1996 tour letters at www.steelydan.com set the band's sardonic public tone, full of false leads and backhanded putdowns of people you didn't know existed. And while Fagen married the formidable singer-scenester Libby Titus in 1994, Becker seems something of a man-about-town. So I can't escape the feeling that a lot of the content is Becker's even if the words and details aren't. This band isn't just a working partnership, CSNY sans applesauce. It's a collaboration at a very deep level.

Though the songs are fictions, they're also revelations—glimpses of middle-aged sophomores looking for validation and the kind of excitement they always held at a distance in the end. Far removed classwise from the petty loserdom of Katy Lied and Can't Buy a Thrill, they're full of heady infatuations and random acts of cruelty, self-interest, and self-hate, vicious cycles blowing hot and cold. Precise, hip, worried, waiting by the phone for a "negative girl" or brimming with pedophile delight at a runaway's cute sexy ways, Fagen always conveys the urgency of attraction. Whether the objects of his desire are young or not, a matter usually left unspecified, they got the juice, so that the metaphor is less being able to get it up than being unable to restrain yourself, which is the first thing fiftysomethings miss when their libidos begin to run down—and which is also the difference between a rote comeback and a near rebirth.

If the price of making a good record is looking like dirty old men, Fagen and Becker have no qualms about paying. Long ago they began their careers as staff songwriters, and for all their jazzy proclivities, song is their element. Imagine the incredibly skilled and through-composed music alone and it's pretty annoying—Medeski Martin & Wood without that band's showoff eccentricity, which in this context would come as a relief. Contemplate the lyrics just as writing and they're also pretty annoying—the superannuated sex fantasies of the rich and neurotic. Put the two together and you have the stuff of great rock and roll that no one has ever come close to duplicating—not even worthy inheritors like Tom Zé and Freedy Johnston. Male computer nerds who've mastered a culture of affluence without making sense of their sex lives should listen up. They won't learn a damn thing, that's not really the idea. But they'll feel a little less alone.

http://www.villagevoice.c...90,22.html
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tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

theAudience said:

I think that's what really makes them stand out--(and why they take so long)--The playing is very important, but never more important than the song itself...they have very specific ideas about where a solo should be and how it should sound in context, especially on record. I remember reading that virtually all the top guitar guys in town took a crack at that Peg solo-- including Larry Carlton Steve Khan and Lee Ritenour, even Denny Dias and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter tried, before they decided that Jay Graydon had the idea they were looking for...all those guys are monster players ...but the solo had to fit Donald and Walter's idea of the song...


...

paligap said:

Exactly.




That very topic was one of the best segments of their VH-1 Classic Albums DVD.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

lookin at those tabs goin "ouch" my fingaz caint do dat no mo'

TheRealFiness said:

S-T-R-E-T-C-H...



...those bad boys.





tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431