The 1980 song that took Steely Dan 274 mixes to get right
If there’s any musical duo known for being studio perfectionists, it’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan.
Their silky-smooth production and painstaking processes are a benchmark for producers to hit still to this day. If you’re aiming for that super-polished texture in a track, well, just about any Steely Dan recording will send euphoric shivers down your spine.
But of course, setting the bar that high can often produce unwanted byproducts, especially when you throw personal relationships into the mix. Case in point—when Steely Dan asked Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits to record some overdubs on ‘Time Out of Mind’ from their seventh studio album Gaucho, the entire experience was a living hell for the guitarist. He compared recording with Steely Dan to “getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boot”.
I love all of Steely Dan’s records, but I’m glad not to have worked or played on them. Perfectionism can often make or break a recording, and I’m surprised in a way that this duo managed to finish anything at all, not to mention put out as many records as they did. Often, it is the spontaneous feeling within a track that lends a song its pulse, not putting every instrument under the microscope as Steely Dan did. But hey, it definitely worked, so my argument is almost totally invalid. There must have just been some kind of unexplainable sonic alchemy between Fagen and Becker.
Regardless, it seems as though the duo’s perfectionism reached a high point on their 1980 LP Gaucho. So much so that the track ‘Babylon Sisters’ was mixed 274 times before Fagen was happy to sign off on it. This specific track was recorded at Village Recorders studio in Los Angeles, which, at that time, was equipped with a top-of-the-range Neve console.
That level of obsession wasn’t just about chasing technical perfection, it was about control. Fagen and Becker weren’t content with capturing a great performance, they wanted to sculpt every frequency until it aligned with the exact sound they had in their heads. In an era when most bands were still relying on feel and instinct, Steely Dan were treating the studio like a laboratory.
It also explains why bringing in outside musicians could be such a fraught experience. Players like Knopfler were used to trusting their gut and letting moments breathe, but within the Steely Dan ecosystem, nothing was left to chance. Every note, every tone, every subtle nuance was up for scrutiny, which could turn even the most straightforward session into an endurance test for anyone not wired the same way.
Effectively, it’s an incredibly high-fidelity console that gives the operator control over several additional sonic details that the typical desk didn’t have at that time. Think of it as dropping the new World of Warcraft expansion for a player who already plays 20 hours a day. Game over.
Fagen was reportedly given a platinum disc after the 250th mix (who the heck was counting?!) and proceeded to mix the track another 24 times before he was eventually happy with the way it sounded. To risk sounding crude, it really was psychotic behaviour. I mean, what could you possibly change after the tenth mix, let alone the 100th or the 274th? By that stage, Fagen needed to be dragged out kicking and screaming and told that no one should ever have that much skin in the game. It’s just not healthy.
Well, maybe we wouldn’t need to go that far. And to be fair to Fagen, the result is pretty stunning. However, I do feel that by 1980, Fagen and Becker’s reputations as studio perfectionists had somewhat become self-fulfilling prophecies. Or perhaps I’m totally wrong, and Fagen’s approach is valid. In which case, I’ll go back over this article another 273 times.
