The one person Donald Fagen called a musical alien: “A little guy from outer space”
Perhaps the reason why music remains such a subjective and unpredictable art form is that the means by which people get into it vary so much. Just ask Donald Fagen.
For a lot of people, music feels like the closest thing to normality they could ever possibly come across. They’re born into a musical world, have a family whose love language is music, and therefore couldn’t see themselves in any other world. This is the most common iteration of musicians that you see in the modern world, given that kids who are born are quite often the children of people connected to the music industry.
When you go back further in time, though, a lot of musicians found sound because of their desperate need for escapism. It was much more rare for them to be born into music, and as such, they saw it as something otherworldly. It was an art form for the outcasts who were looking for somewhere they could feel accepted, and hoped this flamboyant world of vagabonds was where they could find acceptance.
Bob Dylan is one of the greatest examples of this. He never had the most fond words about where he grew up, given that he hardly identified with any of the people there. He lived life on the outskirts, making music, travelling, and hoping to eventually find a group of people that he could identify as his own.
His attitude was met pretty negatively by the people from his hometown. They felt he had left them, used the town as a means to explore and engage with his creativity and then shed it like a snake does its skin. “If Bob Dylan came here to sing tonight, I wouldn’t go,” said one resident when talking about the folk icon, “Bob Dylan doesn’t care about Hibbing, so why should we care about him? Besides that, I don’t like his music.”
Of course, while this move might be seen as controversial by people who get left behind when a musician goes to find their sound, it’s also a necessity for those creatives. Donald Fagen was exactly the same as when he was growing up, despite living in the suburbs; all he could think about was being somewhere else.
When you listen to Steely Dan’s music, there is no escaping the fact that the band were always chasing a sound that would throw people off guard. They prioritised great songwriting over anything else, going so far as to give up performing live completely in a bid to create without any kind of restrictions. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the band were so willing to embrace experimental elements of songwriting, given they have always looked to music as an otherworldly escape.
When he was growing up, Fagen would look up to the musicians he liked, but they weren’t relatable; they may as well have been from another planet as far as the musician was concerned. The way that they played, their experimental approach to sound, and their ability to write songs that seemed completely inaccessible from a creative perspective led to Fagen viewing such artists as universal beings. There was one artist in particular he considered truly alien, and that was Thelonious Monk. Monk was a jazz pianist whose haphazard playing style and free-flowing nature can be heard throughout the music of Steely Dan, and his sound was always destined to find itself in the folds of Fagen’s music, given his poster was always on the budding musicians wall.
“Steven Spielberg makes movies about the suburbs and seems comfortable with them, but I detested the suburbs I lived in,” said Fagen, “He has his fantasies, I had mine – I think Thelonious Monk was the alien in my bedroom, rather than a little guy from outer space.”
