The music legend Donald Fagen said “didn’t work” as a songwriter
The presence Donald Fagen and Walter Becker carved for themselves during the 1970s’ classic rock era was one of confounding originality.
Not that they were rock per se. Melding a novel brew of soft yacht shimmer and progressive jazz explorations, Fagen and Becker’s Steely Dan dropped a string of fusion pop records that straddled a weird realm between sunny Eagles cheer and ironic lyricism shaped by their taste for philosophical humourists and heady sci-fi across Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon—indeed, their name comes from the steam-powered dildo referenced in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
Steely Dan garnered a fiercely loyal fanbase, enamoured with their idiosyncratic songcraft and counter to the day’s stadium-filling rock monsters gyrating on stage. Like Canadian power-trio Rush, Steely Dan charted a similar course through punk’s insurrectionary threat, dropping some of their most celebrated records while their relative peers had lapsed into commercial oblivion or hit existential creative crises. As the 1980s arrived, Steely Dan were still cutting Platinum-selling albums, and Fagen found himself a brief star of the MTV age off the back of 1982’s solo album The Nightfly.
The duo’s songbook hasn’t attracted many renditions. Even for those who don’t find Steely Dan’s numbers coldly studio-perfect and gratingly self-satisfied in their intellectual lyrical fancies, there are scant covers of the pair’s work. Donnie and Marie Osmond attempted ‘Reelin’ In The Years’ which was met with bitter disapproval from fans. Elsewhere, Turin Breaks, Minutemen, and Toto have taken a stab at reimagining Fagen and Becker’s work, but haven’t inspired a cover that’s of any note.
“Most of our tunes were written to be performed only by Steely Dan, they don’t lend themselves very well to cover renditions,” Fagen confessed to Songfacts in 2012. “The lyrics are not the sort that would inspire singers to cover them. And most of the melodies are instrumental type lines, and not songs in the usual sense of the term. By that I mean that a real song, it seems to me, has a kind of melody which is, first of all, very easy to sing. It has a natural flow, usually in a stepwise motion, with consecutive notes, simple arpeggios, and so on”.
He added: “I think our songs were derived more instrumentally, more in the way—not to make a comparison in quality—Duke Ellington would write. I think his songs, in fact, don’t work that well as songs. He wrote for the people in his band, the specific players. He wrote lines he thought they could play well”.
Many swing fans may disagree, but it’s a coherent take on Ellington’s over 2,000 compositions. While his contemporaries would pen numbers without quite knowing who’d end up recording them, Ellington would shape his pieces, be it ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’ or ‘Sophisticated Lady’, to complement the players who happened to play in his big band orchestra of the day.
Highlighting the similarities in-house approach to songcraft, Steely Dan and Ellington’s focus on their creative strengths formed a musical character that stood apart and only intensified their fervent followings.
