The album that sent Donald Fagen into a depression: “I didn’t like what I was doing”
At the height of the 1970s, there were no better perfectionists than Steely Dan. Throughout every album they made, both Donald Fagen and Walter Becker never settled for anything less than pitch-perfect and would often go through dozens of session musicians to get the desired result. After their massive hit album Aja, the band started to fall out of favour with each other and split up after Gaucho.
While Fagen was free to do what he wanted afterwards, he later mentioned that the start of his solo career was a bit of an adjustment. After two years apart from Steely Dan, Fagen’s solo effort The Nightfly took a lot out of him, saying (via Mojo), “I really put everything I knew into that album. I think that, like a lot of artists, especially in the music business, I was successful and young, and I was basically still an adolescent. I was trying to get out of that with The Nightfly. It was kind of self-examination of my childhood. It took me a long time to go through a kind of transformation”.
In a way, it is the perfect paradox for a band like Steely Dan. The whole machine was built on control, on sanding every rough edge until it gleamed, and yet the moment the partnership loosened, the cracks were not musical so much as personal. When you spend years treating the studio like a sealed ecosystem, it becomes dangerously easy to forget how much of the work is really about hiding from yourself rather than chasing some unattainable idea of “perfect”.
That is what makes Fagen’s honesty about The Nightfly and the years around it so striking. The record sounds effortless, like a late-night broadcast drifting through immaculate speakers, but the calm is hard-won. Underneath the precision is a man realising that perfection is not a substitute for peace, and that craftsmanship can still leave you feeling empty once the tape stops rolling.
While Fagen was free to express himself outside of ‘The Dan’’s aesthetic, he mentioned that the end result wasn’t satisfying him, saying, “after that, I really wasn’t inspired to do anything. I fell into a bit of a depression for a while, and I started going to therapy. I felt I had some energy and some new things to write about. I worked every day, but I didn’t like what I was doing. I’d play the songs back the next day and didn’t much like them”.
Fagen was also transparent about how The Nightfly made him reevaluate his approach to the studio. Up until his solo career, he had been a workaholic in the studio, working tirelessly until he got the sound he heard in his head. Now that he was left to his own devices, Fagen was a lot more vulnerable, even when deciding not to tour with ‘The Dan’ or solo.
After running with music for so long, Fagen mentioned having a hard time trying to back away from work, saying, “I basically had to figure out how to have an actual life – the only life I had was in the studio. A lot of it had to do with my not wanting to address certain things that I had to address personally, and working gave me the chance not to do any kind of self-examination”.
While Fagen needed therapy after leaving his main outfit, Becker left the studio rabbit hole by going off the grid. After moving to Hawaii, Becker kicked his drug problem and didn’t even touch any music for a while, saying, “The career was a good organising principle for something that was pretty chaotic in other ways. But eventually, that didn’t work either. And when the dust had settled, it was 1980, and it was time to clean up my act, so I ended up coming here because I wanted a complete change of pace”.
Time makes the heart grow fonder, though, and ‘The Dan’ reemerged years later when Becker came onstage with Fagen to promote his second solo album Kamakiriad. Though ‘The Dan’ would continue both with and without Becker after his death in 2017, the follow-ups like Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go remain the last fans have heard of jazz-rock’s finest.
