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When Steely Dan burst onto the album rock scene in late 1972 with the remarkable Can’t Buy A Thrill, it not only signalled the arrival of one of the great debut LPs, but a new standard in sophisticated pop-rock.
(Becker and Fagen) were always the strangest kind of hitmakers, cramming their tunes full of as many brainy chords, obscure references and off-color characterizations as possible. Yet, against all odds, they still carved out their own proud niche in the classic-rock canon.
Steely Dan is a band that could not come to be now. During the seventies and early eighties, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker created tricksy, extra-credit songs full of jazz learning and recorded them meticulously with session musicians capable of playing at any level, though not usually asked to work to Fagen and Becker’s unforgiving specs. The lyrics were generally jaded assessments of young women, the older men who coveted them, and other humans caught at their least flattering moments. Steely Dan’s original records are creepy and astonishing—they are models of surprise, intricacy, and slick surfaces.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/07/27/hey-09
It’s fair to say that Steely Dan will have a place on the nation’s turntable for as long as they produce music of this magnitude.
Andrew Tyler, Disc, 1973
The typical Steely Dan song, would include a penetrating verse, a rousing chorus, an inspired bridge and, of course, a no holds barred instrumental of some sort. Pop songs with some kind of structure that’s interesting and can be developed. We’re actually pretty traditional in that way, but the chords are usually more interesting than most rock and roll, we think.
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 sounded sort of like Bob Dylan, if Bob had just been defrosted out of a block of carbonite. Other Steely Dan records like Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam, and Aja opened onto a strange and ominous world: double helixes in the sky, Haitian divorcées, the rise and fall of an LSD chef named Charlemagne, someone who drinks Scotch and then “dies behind the wheel.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/06/leave-alexa-alone/
I love music, but as an amateur musician I imagine that a ton of their musical genius goes right over my head; I just know it sounds good.
As a someone who loves writing and grammar and linguistics in general, Steely Dan's lyrics are what take my breath away.
I love how the words occupy that space between comprehension and understanding. By that I mean that over half the time I have no idea what they're talking about, but I don't feel confused. I can just nod along like, "Yeah, I got you, man." Everything Donald sings just dances from his mouth (even when you know they're trying to make it awkward).
I love that no one but them knows exactly what they're talking about. It's like every song is an inside joke between Walter and Don, and even though I'm not in on it I'm laughing right along with them.
When I need to feel cool or confident I sing a Dan song to myself. Because I know that when that duo wrote those words they knew what they were talking about.
GrokTheShape, Reddit-profil
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteelyDan/comments/90l4qm/whats_your_favorite_aspect_of_the_dan/
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