The album Donald Fagen listens to in secret
It’s a truth more or less universally acknowledged that at some point, whatever your line of work is, it just becomes your day job. It doesn’t matter how glamorous or how fun it is. It doesn’t matter whether it makes you five figures a minute or whether you trot around the globe playing arenas with Steely Dan and Donald Fagen, work is work.
There will be days you wake up and just not find it in you to go back to the grindstone again, even if expressing that to anyone will make you the ridicule of everyone you know. In fact, even on those days when your job doesn’t feel like an albatross around your neck, it takes a truly dedicated obsessive to continue engaging with anything remotely related to it outside of working hours.
Fortunately, the great work you find by any of the fine writers at Far Out is absolutely provided by people who will kick back at the end of a long day writing about music by sticking on some more. The people who perform that music? Not so much. Most of the time, our rock heroes immerse themselves in hobbies completely separate from their day jobs. Especially, after said rock heroes reach middle age and beyond.
Brian May has his doctorate in astrophysics, presumably because space is the one place he can go without having to hear some wag putting ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on the stereo. Neil Young has one of the most detailed and large model train sets in the world, and David Crosby had sailing. Even a man like Donald Fagen, who has a convincing argument as being one of the best all-around musicians of the lot, probably cares more about his table tennis these days than the new FKA Twigs album.
What music does Donald Fagen listen to?
Which isn’t to say that any of them don’t care about music anymore. This isn’t about the jaded hacks burnt by an industry they’re chained to, who only look at a piano for a flat fee and play it for ten times that. It’s more that these people have the luxury of developing a healthy work-life balance. So they view music as a brilliant job they take very seriously, but appreciate their time away from. Would that we all could do the same.
Even then, the pull of music is a seductive one, and I’m sure all of them take time away from their other hobbies to play music in their spare time as well. Donald Fagen himself talked about this in an interview with Songfacts, focusing on how he “used to be a workaholic (what a terrible word that is)—up all night, running to the piano before breakfast, that sort of thing. Nowadays, I sometimes stop to smell those proverbial roses.”
Thus, he says, “These days I listen to very little music. When I do, I play old jazz records, Ray Charles, Chicago blues, some French composers, and once in a while, with shutters drawn, I sneak a listen to my crackly copy of Highway 61 Revisited.” It’s telling that Donald Fagen, a man who is as sophisticated and literate as any of his songs, treats listening to one of the greatest albums in the history of pop music like he’s got ‘Agadoo’ on repeat.
That’s the power of great pop music though. No matter how much we are inspired by it, no matter how much we play it, and no matter how many other hobbies we find, we’ll always find out way back to it. Always.
