“The irony”: the two songwriting duos Steely Dan never even tried to compete with
While many people would prefer to have their work be something of a singular vision that helps them to freely express themselves without compromise, there have been plenty of exceptional songwriting duos in the history of popular music, with Steely Dan sitting high up in the pecking order.
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were frankly geniuses, and perhaps too clever to be fully appreciated by the audience they deserved at the time. Much of their material flew over the heads of the people they were aiming to impress and have on board, but this never appeared to prevent them from their pursuit of making records that were entirely in their own creative lane.
Admittedly, the concept of jazz rock was hardly groundbreaking for the time, but the way they excelled at delivering it was untouchable. Few other bands attempted to make anything that was as sonically rich as what Steely Dan were capable of producing, and they recognised that if they were able to keep performing at the peak of their powers, there wouldn’t be any reason for them to lose their crown as the most imaginative act in their field.
This was pretty much the case from the outset, with Can’t Buy A Thrill being one of the most polished debuts of the 1970s. Virtually every song on the album had the potential to have been a hit, and while it was only songs like ‘Do It Again’ and ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ that managed to make an impression on the charts in the US, the level of consistency on show on the album tracks was frankly astounding for a band to be displaying on their debut.
However, this wasn’t the case when they were starting out, and it took them some time to figure out their identity and what they wanted to do when they began operating as a group.
Fagen and Becker’s early years as songwriters for hire operating out of the illustrious Brill Building hit-making factory saw them experiment with a variety of ideas, but it also highlighted to them where they needed to apply their focus.
Fagen revealed more about his thoughts on the direction that popular music was going in at the end of the 1960s during a 2012 interview with Songfacts, and claimed that needing to separate themselves from other celebrated contemporary songwriting duos was necessary for them to excel. “We both thought the predicament in which popular music found itself in the mid ‘60s rather amusing too, and we tried to wring some humour out of the whole mess,” the songwriter proclaimed. “We mixed TV-style commercial arranging cliches with Mersey beats, assigned nasty-sounding, heavily amplified guitars to play Ravel-like chords.”
However, he noted that they saw little to no reason to try and compete with the other songwriting duos of this period, such as Carole King and Gerry Goffin, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney, owing to the fact that ushering in a new era called for a radical shift in approach. “We were after a theatrical effect,” Fagen argued. “The friction produced by the mix of music and lyrics – the irony.”
One could argue that Steely Dan were just as good as both of these aforementioned songwriting partnerships, but they stood out in a different way from their contemporaries and offered what was essentially a necessary development on what these titans had offered in the 1960s as the ‘70s came into full swing.
