Steely Dan’s impossible song: “It’s very existence is a contradiction”
Any artist who even thought about walking into the studio with Steely Dan needed to be at the top of their game.
Throughout their recorded history, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were known to put their instrumentalists through their paces, doing whatever they could to get the best out of them whenever they sat down behind the music stand to play. There may have been some friendly competition trying to make the best take possible, but one of the band’s foundational songs was almost impossible to play on one guitar.
Before the band had even hit it big, though, they were known to make songs that were much more adventurous than anything on the radio. Thanks to their breakthrough hit ‘Do It Again’, their sound was always far afield compared to the other bands on the radio, complete with a sizzling electric sitar solo courtesy of Denny Dias.
While the band would continue to make jazz-influenced rock and roll throughout the 1970s, they also wanted to push the boundaries of what recording technology could be. Working with the best in the business, the band created a different sonic atmosphere on every record they made, from the controversial mix on the album Katy Lied to making some of the more caustic selections in their catalogue on The Royal Scam.
Although the session musicians were known to play what was in front of them, that’s not to say that they didn’t have room to experiment. When putting together a song like ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’, for instance, the band’s confusion about how to start the song led to one of them suggesting that the tune should be led in with one big chord, leading to Larry Carlton’s screaming jazz interval that kicks off the tune.
Once the band had reached 1977, though, they had arrived at the perfect mix of songs and production on Aja. Featuring the landmark singles ‘Peg’ and ‘Deacon Blues’, the album’s cornerstone would be the title track, featuring a masterclass across every instrument, from Fagen’s jaded delivery to Steve Gadd’s phenomenal drum solo.
When talking about putting the final guitar track together, Dias remembered that the whole thing was almost incomprehensible from a guitarist’s perspective, telling Classic Albums, “Its very existence is a contradiction. I mean, when have you ever heard a song on a rock’n’roll record that absolutely cannot be played on a guitar?”.
Although such a lack of confidence would usually get one fired from a Steely Dan session, what Dias is talking about is insanely practical. When looking at the solo, the final takes that were stitched together wouldn’t be accessible with just one set of hands because of how quickly the notes are played.
Instead of not being able to play the song up to tempo, many of the solo sections feature cascading barrages of notes on two separate ends of the fretboard, meaning that a guitar player either needs to have superhuman fingers or would need to have a subsequent guitarist play the second half of the solo. Considering how much Steely Dan was willing to push themselves as composers, it only makes sense that they could stretch their music beyond the threshold of human ability.
What makes the ‘Aja’ guitar part so fascinating is that it exposes Steely Dan’s priorities with complete clarity. Fidelity to the song always came before performative practicality. Becker and Fagen were not interested in whether something could be recreated live or even conceptualised as a single performance. If the best version of the music required splicing together moments of brilliance, then that was simply the cost of precision.
In that sense, the impossibility of the guitar part becomes the point rather than a flaw. ‘Aja’ exists as a studio artefact, a composition designed for the controlled environment of tape rather than the stage. It is a reminder that Steely Dan were less concerned with virtuosity as spectacle and more focused on perfection as an idea. Some songs are meant to be played. Others are meant to be built, piece by piece, until they transcend the limits of the instrument itself.
