The Steely Dan album Aimee Mann called “a perfect record”
From Mac DeMarco to the fictional criminal mastermind Walter White, Steely Dan have widely impacted popular culture. Their refined fusion of rock, jazz, and avant-garde has earned them many fans of different generations, with their name a signifier of not only the late countercultural period but also musical mastery and black comedy.
The misanthropic duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen created many notable moments with Steely Dan. Whether it be the stoned essence of their 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill, the glistening jazz inflexions of 1977’s Aja, or even the maturity of 1980’s Gaucho, their career arc is as fascinating as they come, with both men continuing to push each other to new heights in their time together.
Although they split in 1981 and would not release another album until the arrival of the new millennium in 2000 with the aptly named Two Against Nature, Steely Dan’s music continued to resonate with fans the world over in their time away, despite somewhat antithetical modes such as hair metal, grunge and dance music all imparting themselves on culture during this long span. That’s a feat only genuine greats can boast.
However, many of their most prominent fans were hooked during their first chapter, as they were of the age to witness their brilliance first-hand. One of the most famous is singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, who, as a 15-year-old, discovered the group’s debut album, and, like most who stumble across it, it changed her life.
Notably, Mann is such a big fan of Steely Dan that in 2022, she was due to support them, but due to complications with their management, the dream never materialised. However, she did then take to Twitter to reveal some gilded information that she had earned conversating with Fagen by explaining the true meaning of the song ‘Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)’ from their debut after the surviving Steely Dan leader informed her of it via email.
While Mann is a real aficionado of Steely Dan, their debut album is the one that stands out for her. In fact, she loves it so much that when speaking to Pitchfork in 2020, she glowingly described it as “a perfect record”.
The ‘Save Men’ singer said: “I’ve listened to Can’t Buy a Thrill a thousand times. It’s just a perfect record. Steely Dan have very complicated chord changes. It’s very modal. They also have a really harmonic sensibility that’s not like anybody else’s. The music breaks for long, long solos—and I hate jamming, I hate solos.”
Continuing: “But I guess making people play 20 solos and then putting them together really pays off because all of them feel like melodic parts of the song. And there’s something to their music where you can tell that those guys are assholes, but they also sound like they fucked up in a way that feels familiar.”
Can’t Buy a Thrill marked the perfect start to the remarkably unique musical journey that Steely Dan embarked on, drawing upon an eclectic sonic identity that would evolve in fascinating ways as the years progressed. Listen to the album below.
