I've been a fan of Steely Dan for quite a while now, & I've noticed that I really can't say they've ever made a horrible album whatsoever. Even their last two albums have been [at least] decent. Exactly how underrated are these guys? I don't think they get the props [or respect for those who don't know what "props" are ] they deserve. Heck, I'd listen to a Steely Dan album any day over an Eagles album.....

[Edited 7/31/11 6:21am]

No, but they came close with, "Everything Must Go", there follow up to "Two Against Nature". It was not horrible, but it was not great. It seems like they rushed it. As for them being, "underrated", I they are my favorite group so I am biased when I say that in some ways, yes. Donald Fagen, is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

[Edited 7/31/11 6:27am]

I don't think they've ever release a bad album. Even their post-1980 work has merit, but Aja remains their last masterpiece.

shorttrini said:

No, but they came close with, "Everything Must Go", there follow up to "Two Against Nature". It was not horrible, but it was not great. It seems like they rushed it.

But that's my point. 'EMG' is still at least decent. "Slang of Ages" is a truly dope song.

silverchild said:

I don't think they've ever release a bad album. Even their post-1980 work has merit, but Aja remains their last masterpiece.

Very True. Donald Fagen's 'Nightfly' was a classic too.

Tittypants said:

shorttrini said:

No, but they came close with, "Everything Must Go", there follow up to "Two Against Nature". It was not horrible, but it was not great. It seems like they rushed it.

But that's my point. 'EMG' is still at least decent. "Slang of Ages" is a truly dope song.

I listen to, "Two Against Nature", at least once a week. I cannot say that about, "Everything Must Go". Have not listened to it in years. Compared to their others, and TGN, it just does not stand up well.

shorttrini said:

Tittypants said:

But that's my point. 'EMG' is still at least decent. "Slang of Ages" is a truly dope song.

I listen to, "Two Against Nature", at least once a week. I cannot say that about, "Everything Must Go". Have not listened to it in years. Compared to their others, and TGN, it just does not stand up well.

Actually I listen to Everything Must Go more than Two Against Nature. But overall, both albums don't have that much replay value in my library of music...

Tittypants said:

silverchild said:

I don't think they've ever release a bad album. Even their post-1980 work has merit, but Aja remains their last masterpiece.

Very True. Donald Fagen's 'Nightfly' was a classic too.

I don't think I've listened to that album yet. I hear about it alot but I haven't discovered it yet. I might have to check it out sooner than later.

silverchild said:

Tittypants said:

Very True. Donald Fagen's 'Nightfly' was a classic too.

I don't think I've listened to that album yet. I hear about it alot but I haven't discovered it yet. I might have to check it out sooner than later.

oh, please do! ASAP as a matter of fact...

"Nightfly", and it's two sequels, "KarmaKariad" and "Morp The Cat", are excellent!

shorttrini said:

"Nightfly", and it's two sequels, "KarmaKariad" and "Morp The Cat", are excellent!

Pretty much.

Tittypants said:

I've been a fan of Steely Dan for quite a while now, & I've noticed that I really can't say they've ever made a horrible album whatsoever. Even their last two albums have been [at least] decent. Exactly how underrated are these guys? I don't think they get the props [or respect for those who don't know what "props" are ] they deserve. Heck, I'd listen to a Steely Dan album any day over an Eagles album.....

[Edited 7/31/11 6:21am]

I don't think they're underrated or overrated. I'd be surprised if there's new Steely Dan music when Don and Walt have been working on their own songs. I think as soon as Becker started gaining confidence in singing his own songs, it kind of put an end to them collaborating on songwriting together. It's been 8 years since EMG came out. Donald was in the forefront on their classic albums that people were going "what the hell does Walter Becker do?" Wrote mostly lyrics and the guitar solos, Fagen came up with some of the lyrics, melodies and the choruses. It's like Gilmour singing Waters' lyrics in Pink Floyd, it's a formula & blend that works.

EMG and 2vN were prob. recorded around the same time, or at least written around the same time.

Nightfly was Grammy nominated, and was pretty upbeat, but Gaucho was pretty downbeat.. with good reason. Bleak time for Becker and Fagen.

Pretzel Logic is so so.

Tittypants said:

I've been a fan of Steely Dan for quite a while now, & I've noticed that I really can't say they've ever made a horrible album whatsoever. Even their last two albums have been [at least] decent.

Not for me. Probably my favorite Pop band.

Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

shorttrini said:

No, but they came close with, "Everything Must Go", there follow up to "Two Against Nature". It was not horrible, but it was not great. It seems like they rushed it. As for them being, "underrated", I they are my favorite group so I am biased when I say that in some ways, yes. Donald Fagen, is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

Based on the 20 year gap between the release of Gaucho and Two Against Nature, 3 years for the release of Everything Must Go is relatively quick.

There are reasons for the "quick-release" and sound of 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.

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.


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?


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!


Excerpts from a 2003 MIX Magazine interview:
http://mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_steely_dan_everything/
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Everything Must Go was, naturally, a project of such importance, and Becker enthuses about how having "a great bunch of musicians in a room" supports analogue recording and their decision to play live. "One of the things that people discovered is that when you're mixing, you're not necessarily trying to make things distinct, you're trying to blend them together. With digital recording this can be difficult. But analogue, because it changes the sound a little bit more than digital does, tends to blend and process things so that it sounds more coherent and unified. You want to make the guys in the band sound like they're playing together.

"It's actually always been our first plan on any project to get a live band together. It's true that we've often worked with various sorts of track manipulations, but always as a last resort."

"Most of the time we've used technology at the tracking stage because we were unable to the track with a live band," adds Fagen. "It was a desperation tool."

"This time we had better luck," Becker continues, "because of the musicians that we found in the last two years, particularly drummer Keith Carlock. He also played on one track on Two Against Nature and is able to play in any number of styles and still remain himself. He's a great groove drummer and a good jazz drummer as well. So he has the technique and the happening backbeat. He just nailed every song that we gave to him and by the end of the day, or sooner, we'd have a track down on tape. We had a six-guy band with two guitar players [Jon Herington and Hugh McCracken], two keyboard players [Fagen and Ted Baker], and bass and drums. Everybody felt the same way and was able to get on the same wavelength and really define the rhythm and come up with cool parts."

A lot of the feel for Everything Must Go comes from the seamless interplay between Becker on bass and Carlock on drums, surely the reason why Becker preferred to play bass and not guitar in the six-piece. According to Scheiner, Fagen and Becker's working method was to rehearse one or two tracks in a rehearsal studio, record these tracks live with the band in Sear Sound Studio A, and overdub and mix soon after, mostly in Skyline Studios (NYC) and Presence Studios (Connecticut) respectively. A few weeks later the process would be repeated for the next batch of songs.

The first recordings and overdubs took place in August 2001, with 'Things I Miss The Most' and 'Lunch With Gina', and the final mix for the album was completed in November 2002. Elliot Scheiner explains some of the technical details of the tracking sessions at Sear. "The desk was an old 36-input Neve 8036, and we used Studer A827 24-tracks with Dolby SR. We used two, so I could do edits, for instance replacing a bad chorus with a better chorus from somewhere else. Any fixes that needed to be made were done right there on analogue. To have six musicians play live in one room at the same time is amazing today. We were able to put all of them in the small room at Sear, and keep the leakage situation fairly contained. The smallness of the room actually added a nice liveness to the drums. You won't believe this, but I used [Electrovoice] RE20s as room mics, and I put them in the surround speakers in the 5.1 mix.


Excerpts from a 2003 SOS article: http://www.soundonsound.c...elydan.htm
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

It took a few listens for me to get into Everything Must Go.

But that's one of the reasons I like their recordings, the undiscovered things that appear after repeated listenings.



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

silverchild said:

Tittypants said:

Very True. Donald Fagen's 'Nightfly' was a classic too.

I don't think I've listened to that album yet. I hear about it alot but I haven't discovered it yet. I might have to check it out sooner than later.

Some cool tracks from The Nightfly...



...Maxine




...New Frontier




...The Nightfly




...Walk Between The Raindrops



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

Great clip on the recording of Peg from the...



...Classic Albums DVD



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

A great DVD

Donald Fagen breaks dwon...



...Peg



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

theAudience said:

Donald Fagen breaks dwon...



...Peg



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

DOPE!

A Steely Dan thread.

theAudience said:

Donald Fagen breaks dwon...



...Peg



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

at all that theory behind the tune

HohnerCatcher said:

HAHHAHA!

Those two are jokers!

Their interviews are always dry and witty!

nd33 said:

HohnerCatcher said:

HAHHAHA!

Those two are jokers!

Their interviews are always dry and witty!

I find a lot of their lyrics witty too

horrible? hell no. they all rank between very good and fantastic

even Everything Must Go is a gem in my book. "Things I miss the most" is musically and lyrically a wonderfully crafted masterpiece that is right on par with their best earlier classics

There's also a bunch of demos out there that they've said they have no plans on releasing.

There's a set of demos from 68-70 called the Catalyst Demos which were released to record stores, and repackaged way too many times. Some of these songs would wind up on the first 4 or 5 albums. They get no royalty money from these recordings, they're pretty easy to find though.

There was a soundtrack to a little known movie called "You Got To Walk It Like You Talk It" from 1970 which had Richard Pryor and "Red Shoes Diaries" creator Zalman King in the movie. And Robert Downey Sr.... and it was one of the first movies horror director Wes Craven ever worked on. This was Steely Dan's first recording, and has also been repackaged and re-released over the years. Fagen sings on a couple of songs.

The first single they put out is not on any album or compilation. You can find it pretty easily, and might even go "why don't they include it on "Can't Buy a Thrill?"" It's called "Dallas" and "Sail the Waterway".

They didn't tour for long, but there's about 3 or 4 soundboard bootlegs from the 1974 tour. They're all great, one's a radio concert, and the others are from England and Irvine. There's also one that was recorded in Santa Monica which the band released the live "Bodhishatva", but they've never released the rest of the concert.

There's demos on the various sites for Katy Lied & Royal Scam demos and outtakes. Aja didn't have much in the way of outtakes and demos, but Gaucho had a significant amount.

How these demos got out to the public? I think Becker leaked them himself. When they put "Citizen" box set out, they went through the demos and didn't feel they were worth putting on there. He knows they'd wind up in the hands of fans, and not bootleggers who would charge people money to buy them.

BombSquad said:

horrible? hell no. they all rank between very good and fantastic

even Everything Must Go is a gem in my book. "Things I miss the most" is musically and lyrically a wonderfully crafted masterpiece that is right on par with their best earlier classics

Co-Sign

The Nightfly is a little difficult for me simply because it sounds as if it was created in a sterile laboratory environment. Steely Dan has always been clean, but...that's not to say it's bad, it's just that normally I am a fan of their production in addition to their music.

Two against nature is pretty sterile, too, but I like it more than the Nightfly.

but I also don't see why they would have released a horrible album. It seems impossible without one of them losing their minds