The two Steely Dan songs the band can’t stand: “It’s been played so much”
Not many bands are as reluctant to discuss their work as Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan.
The uniquely jazz-influenced rock group have made a sport out of dodging questions about their much-beloved catalogue. However, on the few occasions the group has opened up about their work, they have thrown the odd barb out at their most beloved hits.
‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ and ‘Reelin’ In the Years’ are likely two of the group’s biggest hits. But like any true artist, the duo are less than enthused about their stature and have even admitted to having grown tired of the two tracks despite their immense popularity with their fanbase.
In 1974, there were few radio stations that weren’t ready to drop the needle on ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Nuber’. The song, taken from the Pretzel Logic LP, has gone down in Steely Dan’s history as a timeless classic. Inspired by the moment Donald Fagen fell momentarily in love with an artist by the name of Rikki Ducornet, who, despite being both married and pregnant at the time of meeting Fagen at a college party, intrigued the frontman enough to leave his number with her.
Ducornet later admitted that she had been tempted to give Fagen a call but eventually decided against it. While the couple would never become a relationship, the meeting did provide Steely Dan with their biggest commercial hit. If there was one tune to rival that humongous hit in the face of the group’s oeuvre, it would be ‘Reelin’ In The Years’.
Despite its straightforward structure, the song still carried the hallmarks of Steely Dan’s songwriting. Its memorable piano motif, borrowed from Horace Silver’s jazz composition Song for My Father, hinted at the duo’s knack for weaving sophisticated musical influences into accessible pop songs without sacrificing their identity.
Released in 1973 as part of the band’s debut record, Can’t Buy A Thrill, the track encapsulates the group’s ability to sound both laidback and note-perfect. However, in recent years, the group have regularly labelled it their least favourite tune, with Fagan remarking the song was “dumb but effective” while Becker would label it “no fun”. This unwanted attribution of apathy towards the tune also spread to the other aforementioned hit.
“Walter and I aren’t fond of ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’,” Fagen told Rolling Stone in 2013. “It’s not a bad song. I think it’s ‘well-written,’ but it’s so simple. I just have listening fatigue. It’s been played so much. Same with ‘Reelin’ in the Years.'”
Their attitude wasn’t unusual for Fagen and Becker, who often held themselves to impossibly high standards. Rather than judging their songs by their commercial success, they tended to focus on the complexity of the arrangements and compositions, which perhaps explains why some of their most beloved radio staples left them feeling comparatively underwhelmed.
If there was one set of musicians able to critique their greatest hits with the meticulous shrug of inch-perfect indifference, it would be Steely Dan. The group’s ability to share lounge-adjacent rock songs with a drilled-down musical backdrop is replicated in their creation of ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Nuber’ and ‘Reelin’ In The Years’ as their later derision of them.
Ultimately, the duo’s indifference says more about their perfectionism than the songs themselves. While listeners continue to embrace ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ and ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ as defining moments in Steely Dan’s catalogue, Fagen and Becker always seemed more interested in the next musical challenge than in celebrating past successes. It’s an outlook that helped make their catalogue so distinctive, even if it meant growing weary of the very songs that introduced them to the world.
