by Kevin Burton
Steely Dan and four others will be inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame this year, according to multiple reports.
R.E.M. and three non-performing songwriters, Hillary Lindsey, Timothy Moseley (Timberland) and Dean Pritchard will also be inducted.
I don’t know if the Songwriters’ hall has toxic politics the way the Rock and Roll Hall does, but I’m thinking Steely Dan should have been enshrined long ago.
“They got a name for the winners in the world. I want a name when I lose.”
“The Cuervo Gold. The fine Colombian. Make tonight a wonderful thing.”
“It will come back to you. Then the shutter falls. You see it all in 3-D. It’s your favorite foreign movie.”
“If these lyrics mean nothing to you, we’re sorry that you’ve lived such an unfulfilled life devoid of bodacious cowboys and major dudes,” writes Devon Ivie on vulture.com.
“Steely Dan will be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame as part of its 2024 class, with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker joining a group that includes fellow lyrical maestros R.E.M. and Timberland”
“The ceremony will take place in June in New York City. Yes, we agree this honor has arrived decades too late, especially given Becker’s death back in 2017 (and the fact that the duo were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2001). But better late than whenever California tumbles into the sea ,” Ivie writes.
I think Steely Dan is great and I’m pretty sure they are better than I think. This is because their lyrics are so hard to understand sometimes, surely I am missing some of their genius.
“With (Walter) Becker’s knotty soloing and funky bass licks paired with Donald Fagen’s organ tones and earnest, knowing croon, the pair stand alone: too literate and socially conscious for soft rock, too naff for hard, and all the better for it,” wrote Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian on the occasion of Beckers 2017 death.
I think he got it right. Steely Dan isn’t comparable to any other artist I know.
“If ever a band didn’t conform to a label, it was Steely Dan,” writes Brendan Sainsbury in Reader’s Digest UK. Fifty years after the release of their debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill, their music continues to defy neat classification.”
“For many, the beauty is in the contradictions—the way that the band’s smooth, silky songs are created from such wildly dissonant elements.”
“Unorthodox from the outset, song-writing partners, Fagan and Becker first moved from gritty New York to glamorous LA in 1971. Signed by American record producer Gary Katz, they formed a six-piece band, named it Steely Dan after a fictional sex-toy, and proceeded to create what would become the quintessential sound of Californian jazz-rock,” Sainsbury writes.
“Despite being a talented live act, the band gave up touring in 1974 with the goal of pursuing pop perfection in the studio,” Sainsbury writes. Disposing of most of their original line-up in favor of a revolving roster of session players, Fagan and Becker set themselves up as conductors of an ever-changing musical “co-op” that quickly came to epitomize the group’s super-slick sound: an improbable juxtaposition of cynical, esoteric lyrics and skillfully crafted tunes.”
“It was like Mozart blended with Jack Kerouac in a smoky jazz club. In a Steely Dan song every word had a meaning, every note a justification. The lyrics were particularly important. Steely Dan didn’t croon dewy-eyed love songs like their fellow west coast rockers,” Sainsbury writes.
“Instead, inspired by their penchant for beatnik literature, Fagan and Becker penned jaded, world-weary tales of losers, hookers, drug-dealers and outlaws, full of sardonic quips and black humor. The fact that such downbeat stories collided caustically with the band’s velvety music only made them better.”
“Musically, what began as a radio-friendly combo of classic rock mixed with R&B evolved, over the course of seven albums, into jazzier, more challenging songs,” Sainsbury writes. “Gradually, as the band logged bigger hits, they were able to buy more studio time, hire better musicians and employ finer studio wizardry.”
“Aja, Steely Dan’s sixth studio album, which came out in 1977, was so meticulously produced that some critics deemed it almost perfect. But for many of the musicians who worked on the record, it was something more than perfect,” Sainsbury wrote.
“We would work past the perfection point, until it became natural, until it sounded almost improvised in a way,” said session guitarist Dean Parks in a 1999 documentary about the Aja album. “It was like a two-step process. One was to get to perfection, the other was to get beyond it and loosen it up a little bit so that it didn’t have to be the perfect, squeaky-clean goal.”
“ It’s testament to the band’s genius that many great session musicians defined their careers through their work on a Steely Dan tune,” Sainsbury wrote.
“Notables include Larry Carlton’s avant-garde guitar solo on “Kid Charlemagne”, Steve Gadd’s and Wayne Shorter’s astounding drum/sax face-off on the song “Aja,” and Eliot Randall’s one-take guitar lick on “Reelin’ in the Years,” later rated by Jimmy Page as his all-time favorite.
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