Ira Robbins, Newsday,
1 March 2006
Donald Fagen makes and releases solo albums on a timetable more familiar to comet-watchers than observers of pop’s hectic rush. Working in the off portions of Steely Dan’s four decades of on-and-off-again existence, the Grammy-winning singer-keyboardist from Passaic, NJ, has come up with three albums in twenty-four years, and that’s stretching it, since Morph The Cat won’t be out until next week. At this rate, the Fagen section in CD stores will not expand again until 2017.
Reached by phone during rehearsals for a March-long tour, Fagen, fifty-eight, says the three albums form a trilogy.
‘It’s nothing premeditated. I tend to [make records] after I’m in some other next phase of life and have something to say about it. When I did my first album, The Nightfly, in ’81, I wrote a couple of songs and realised they were an adolescent’s look at the world, so I just kept writing songs like that. When I had enough to fill … forty-five minutes, because it was a vinyl record, I was done. The same thing happened with my second album, Kamakiriad, in 1993. That was really about midlife. At that point, I figured I should write a third album about the end of life. Only this time, I had to fill an hour because it’s a CD.’
Stylistically, Morph The Cat doesn’t stray far from Steely Dan’s pretzel logic: exquisitely clear production of genial funk, jazz and soul stylings with wry, literate lyrics in narrative frames, fragments of short stories told from surprising points of view. ‘What I Do’, for instance, offers a young man’s dialogue with the ghost of Ray Charles. ‘Mary Shut the Garden Door’ is a response to the 2004 Republican convention, and ‘Security Joan’ is about finding romance with an airport guard.
Indeed, Fagen says women are what differentiates Steely Dan from the solo albums he and his partner, bassist-guitarist Walter Becker, make. ‘We both have families and wives and everything. Steely Dan is guys without girls. The collective persona we unintentionally developed is a guy who’s talking to the guys, except once in a while, he breaks down and you get to see that he’s unstable. Kind of like Dick Cheney. Every once in a while, he takes a shot in the bushes without knowing what he’s shooting at.’
Becker, who produced Fagen’s second solo record, has no role on Morph The Cat, but there’s no gauging that impact. Fagen says, ‘We started working together when we were young and developed a style together. On my own, I’ll sometimes say, “Hey, Walter, what do you think about this?” and there’s no answer. It’s very frightening.’ (Yet Becker found it lonely writing songs on a computer for his first solo project, 11 Tracks of Whack. ‘But it got a little better as I went along, especially after I started calling the computer Donald.’)
While voters get the politicians they deserve, bands can attract audiences they don’t always expect. ‘When Steely Dan started out, we had a more normative band … So our fans were the usual bunch of psychos, just normal rock fans. The sort of psychos we have now are a much higher class of people.’ A wry tone creeps into Fagen’s voice. ‘A lot of dentists. Every time I go to the dentist in any city, they’ve always got plenty of Steely Dan records to play while they’re drilling your teeth and producing pain. Whole dental colleges run on Steely Dan music.’
He’s kidding, and chuckles at a joke about the music’s possible anaesthetic effects. He takes in his stride a suggestion that Steely Dan’s marriage of jazz and pop could have – by the removal of irony and intelligence – mutated into smooth jazz. ‘I’ll publicly apologise for that if you want. It’s certainly nothing we intended.’