Steely Dan

100 Best Albums

  • SEP 23, 1977
  • Aja
  • 7 Songs

Essential Albums

  • Aja
    Aja
    Aja

    100 Best Albums In a Rolling Stone interview from around the time Aja came out, the writer Cameron Crowe—who went on to write and direct Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, amongst a handful of other movies—marveled at how aloof the members of Steely Dan could be when it came to their own success. They were no longer touring, and they weren’t doing a lot of press. And their approach to recording had evolved from a fixed group of people playing a set of songs from start to finish to a piecemeal process in which co-founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker tried out multiple players for the same part, until they found a satisfactory combination—all before breaking it down and starting all over again on the next song. (Decades later, guitarist Dean Parks diplomatically reflected that “we would work then past the perfection point until it became natural.”) Asked if he felt like he was even in a band, Becker replied, “No. But we can get a real good one together in a hurry.” As sophisticated as the process was, Steely Dan never sounded more direct as it does on Aja. There’s the R&B of “Josie.” The bounce of “Black Cow” (and its destiny-fulfilling sample, 20 years later, on Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’s “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)”). And the fact that “Peg” felt like actual dance music, rather than a dissertation on it. In the coastal fog of 1970s California pop, Fagen and Becker had always appeared like bookish New York hipsters raised on R&B and jazz. But Aja was the first time that identity had come through so clearly in the music. And while there are plenty of close seconds, no character better captured Steely Dan’s tragic romanticism like the suburban guy on “Deacon Blues,” who fantasizes about becoming a saxophone player—only to get drunk and die in a car wreck. Yeah, he’s a loser. But least he believed in something.

  • Katy Lied
    Katy Lied
    Katy Lied

    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 neighborhood 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.

  • Pretzel Logic
    Pretzel Logic
    Pretzel Logic

    Released in 1974, Pretzel Logic marked the pivot point between the touring band Steely Dan had been and the studio-born project they became. The album is a rejection of the 1960s ideal of a rock band as a small group of like-minded people collectively expressing their creativity through their own original material. Instead, Steely Dan embraced what co-founder Donald Fagen later described as the “scrupulous meritocracy” of the big-band era—a time in which bandleaders hired whomever served the song best. Steely Dan adopted that approach, and threw in some characteristic ruthlessness for color. The result was Pretzel Logic, a succinct sucker-punch of an album that embodied the philosophy Steely Dan had espoused in songs like “Barrytown” or “Through With Buzz”: To hell with feeling—they were embracing the machine. And, boy—does the knife gleam on Pretzel Logic. Even the album’s comforting moments—“Any Major Dude Will Tell You” and the eternal “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”—are haunted by the sense of something withheld or unsaid. Here were the mysteries of old pulp fiction and detective stories, combined with the fragmented thinking of acid burnouts and conspiracy theorists trying to make sense of an increasingly nonsensical world—or, in Steely Dan’s case, Southern California. That’s where Fagen and his partner Walter Becker had been living while working on Pretzel Logic.“It turned out the sunny clime and prefab cookie-cutter robo-culture in which we now found ourselves only served to heighten our paranoia and alienation,” the duo later wrote. “We had our songs, some nice axes, good girlfriends, brand-new drivers’ licenses, lots of 24-track studio time, and a warm place to compose. In other words, Miles was in heaven and all was right in the world.” Steely Dan would get darker (The Royal Scam) and colder, too (Gaucho), but Pretzel Logic strikes the balance between the classic-rock guys your parents and grandparents loved, and the insular creeps who lurked underneath.

  • Can't Buy A Thrill
    Can't Buy A Thrill
    Can't Buy A Thrill

    On the one hand, Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album is home to some of the most definitive and best-known songs in 1970s American rock; on the other, it’s barely a glimpse of where the band went next. Having bonded over Beat poetry and 1950s jazz—not to mention a shared sense of humor so dry and bitter, it stings more than a half-century later—college students Donald Fagen and Walter Becker tried their hand at selling pop songs to others before effectively realizing nobody was weird enough to play their music but them. The Steely Dan sound was too restrained to qualify as jazz, too sophisticated to count as rock, and too obscure to be categorized as pop. Yet on Can’t Buy a Thrill, Fagen and Becker managed to stretch the parameters of all three genres in ways that made the group seem totally (if quietly) radical compared to most of what was going on the radio at the time. As the duo put it in the album’s belated liner notes, Fagen and Becker had arrived in California with a book of songs that had to be “adjusted and refined to take into account the new musical environment in which we found ourselves operating, and also to reflect our belated understanding of the aesthetic shortcomings of some of our less-than-accessible, more doggedly surrealist efforts.” For the English speakers out there, that translates into such radio-dominating Can’t Buy a Thrill breakthroughs as “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ In the Years,” and “Dirty Work.” As successful as the album became, it also established Steely Dan as a kind of cult band subversively worming their way through the digestive tract of commercial pop. These were the guys in the corner snickering about something the rest of the party didn’t and couldn’t understand. But while Fagen and Becker may have been arrogant, they were also outcasts. One former tour mate described the duo as the Manson and Starkweather of rock ’n’ roll, a reference to Charles Manson and the spree killer Charles Starkweather (for their part, Fagen and Becker later joked that they weren’t sure who was supposed to be which). When punk, with all its cynicism and sarcasm, came into the picture later in the decade, you’d have to squint to see its resemblance to Steely Dan. But on Can’t Buy a Thrill, it’s definitely there: “You been tellin’ me you’re a genius since you were 17,” Fagen sneers on “Reelin’ in the Years.” “In all the time I’ve known you I still don’t know what you mean.”

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About Steely Dan

With their jazz-schooled chops and studio-crafted elegance, Steely Dan symbolized the softening of rock throughout the '70s. But though their music projected an air of affluence, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were more 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 catalog 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

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