Latest Release
- 23 DEC 2023
- 3 Songs
- A Decade of Steely Dan (Remastered) · 1973
- A Decade of Steely Dan (Remastered) · 1980
- The Royal Scam · 1976
- Bristow, Va 1996 · 1996
- Katy Lied · 1975
- The Old Regime · 2003
- The Royal Scam · 1976
- Stone Piano · 1988
- Stone Piano · 1988
- Live in the Studio - The Record Plant 1974 · 2017
Essential Albums
- Alongside Pretzel Logic, 1975’s Katy Lied forms the hinge point between the warm jazz-rock of early Steely Dan and the almost antiseptically tight sound of such later efforts as Aja and Gaucho. Song for song, it’s probably their sweetest album. Or, at least, it’s the only album that gives you the sense that the members of Steely Dan were as susceptible to tenderness and nostalgia as the rest of us—even if it’s nostalgia for an awful relationship (“Rose Darling”), or for that guy who used to lure neighbourhood teenagers with porn (“Everyone’s Gone to the Movies”), or for being a loser in general (“Bad Sneakers”). You can picture the potential ad copy for Katy Lied on a billboard—maybe over the LA freeway, maybe amongst the lights of Times Square: “Steely Dan makes bad vibes sound good”. It’s still amazing to trace Steely Dan’s cultural trajectory over the years: While contemporaries like the Eagles sound definitively like products of their time, Steely Dan only seems to get more relevant. Their fragmented-but-obsessive studio practice has filtered down to modern artists like Frank Ocean, and their interplay of cynicism and sincerity helped lay the foundation for Charli XCX and Lana Del Rey. This was a group that pleased crowds, but could hardly be described as “crowd-pleasers”; a group that sounded polished and professional, but that taught you to be suspicious of polish and professionalism. Art could be messy. But Steely Dan? Get the right equipment, and keep the workers in line, and Steely Dan could be perfect.
Albums
- 1988
Artist Playlists
- Jazz-infused art-rock that's been catching ears since the ‘70s.
- Becker and Fagen flash touches of rock, country and classical.
- Their jazz-rock echoes throughout R&B, disco and New Wave.
- The jazz rockers loved hard bop and cool soul.
- The slickest grooves of the '70s, imaginatively repurposed.
Live Albums
Compilations
- 2013
More To Hear
- Where social commentary meets audio excellence.
- The legendary artist shares stories about his music career.
- Elton John sits down with Hannah Reid to discuss the band’s album Truth Is a Beautiful Thing.
- A hat-tip to Steely Dan's classic Aja.
- Sisters Este, Danielle and Alana from the band Haim.
About Steely Dan
With their jazz-schooled chops and studio-crafted elegance, Steely Dan symbolised the softening of rock throughout the 1970s. But though their music projected an air of affluence, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were mostly interested in lyrically interrogating the era’s decadence, staging each song as a swanky high-society party infiltrated by prostitutes, gamblers and other wayward souls desperate to make a dollar. Upon forming in New York in 1972, Steely Dan projected more of a streetwise edge on early standards like the Santana-esque “Do It Again” and “Reeling in the Years”, whose arpeggiated guitar hook anticipated the twinned-lead solos of Thin Lizzy. But like The Beatles before them, Fagen and Becker stopped touring to reinvent Steely Dan as a studio-based, session-player-powered entity, pursuing a more finessed fusion of jazz, rock and soul that achieved its apotheosis on 1977’s immaculate Aja. And yet, as their music became more sophisticated, Fagen’s lyrics turned more seedy and cynical, lacing the proto-disco groove of “Peg” with suggestive casting-couch intimations, while using the smooth strut of “Hey Nineteen” to catalogue the dysfunctional relationship between an older man and his teenage lover. After splitting in 1981, Steely Dan enjoyed a surprise second act beginning with 2000’s Two Against Nature, proving they’re still the only band that can write a breezy song about incestual desire (“Cousin Dupree”) and get Grammys in return. The 21st century saw Steely Dan become a more active touring act than ever before, and Fagen kept the show on the road even after Becker’s death from cancer in 2017. All the while, Steely Dan continue to cast a long shadow over the contemporary musical landscape, through the forward-thinking rappers (Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa) who’ve sampled their supple arrangements, and the indie iconoclasts (Mac DeMarco, Father John Misty) who embed illicit ideas in soothing songs.
- ORIGIN
- Los Angeles, CA, United States
- FORMED
- 1972
- GENRE
- Rock