Steely Dan Essentials

With their jazz-schooled chops and studio-crafted elegance, Steely Dan symbolised 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. They projected a streetwise edge on early standards like the Santana-esque “Do It Again” and “Reeling in the Years”. 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 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, winning a Grammy for “Cousin Dupree”. 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 in 2017.