After reading the news of Sonny Rollins’s death this week at age 95, I took a look back at what Walter Becker and Donald Fagen said over the years about the Saxophone Colossus. Journalists trying to figure out Steely Dan’s secret sauce regularly asked Becker and Fagen about their primary influences, and they almost always mentioned Rollins in the company of Bird, Duke, Miles, Mingus, and Monk.

“Walter and I started with the idea that freedom was a given because our heroes were Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins,” Fagen told The Telegraph in 2006. When I asked Fagen three years ago about the albums he has listened to most often, his answer included, “All Sonny’s stuff through The Bridge”—nearly 20 albums over a wildly inventive 10-year stretch.

It can be tempting to see Rollins’s music as a “Rosebud”-like key to understanding Fagen’s inner life. On the cover of his debut solo album, The Nightfly, Fagen poses as the kind of after-hours jazz disc jockey he heard on the radio as a kid in the New Jersey suburbs, and the record he’s spinning is none other than Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders from 1959.

Around the age of 12, Fagen began taking the bus into Manhattan to attend shows at jazz clubs. “At the Village Vanguard, my distress at being the youngest person in the audience would dissolve as soon as the music started,” he wrote in his memoir, Eminent Hipsters. “In the early ’60s, gods stood on that tiny stage. A lot of them drank J&B and smoked Luckies, but they were gods just the same. Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane were still youngish, fearless, and working at the summit of their creativity.”

In the December 18, 1993, issue of Melody Maker, Fagen was asked to share some of the records he deemed essential. Among his dozen selections was a tune off of Rollins’s The Bridge. The list was first republished in a 1994 issue of Metal Leg, the original Steely Dan fanzine. Now, with this mixtape, you can listen to all of Fagen’s picks while reading his commentary below.

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In July 2024, I published a newsletter headlined “Donald Fagen: ‘There is no more Steely Dan.’” The piece included a transcript of Fagen’s November 1989 appearance on K-Rock radio, during which he spoke at length with “Rock and Roll Madame” Jo Maeder and spun some favorite records.

At the time Fagen was promoting the New York Soul concerts he was doing with an all-star band at the Lone Star Roadhouse, the precursor to the New York Rock and Soul Revue. “This is not—repeat, not—a Steely Dan concert of any kind,” he warned the station’s listeners, “so don’t come expecting that show which will never be, probably, and just doesn’t exist.”

That newsletter, part of the “From the Archives of Brian Sweet” series, would end up being the top Expanding Dan edition of 2024. So I was particularly excited, while recently digitizing more of Sweet’s collection of interview tapes, to stumble upon the recording of Fagen’s K-Rock spot.

Hearing the broadcast in full is a real treat because, between the conversation segments, Fagen and Maeder play so much great music. There are cuts by Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, Yellowjackets, Betty Harris, Willie Dixon, Joe Simon, Dr. John, and a live recording of Phoebe Snow singing “Bring It on Home To Me” during Howard Stern’s birthday broadcast at the West Bank Cafe.

Buy Reelin’ in the Years, by Brian Sweet, directly from the publisher, Omnibus Press.

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Cimcie Nichols couldn’t believe her eyes.

One day in August 2023, she was sorting through the archives of her father, longtime Steely Dan recording engineer Roger Nichols, who died in 2011. She removed the lid of one unfamiliar storage box, and inside she saw dozens of envelopes full of photo negatives. They were labeled in her father’s handwriting: “Steely Dan in Hollywood,” “Steely Dan Studio,” “Steely Dan Santa Monica Civic Concert,” and so on.

A former nuclear engineer and obsessive audiophile, Roger became the chief technician behind Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s quest to make perfect-sounding albums. Less known is the informal role he assumed as Steely Dan’s archivist. He squirreled away track sheets, recording notes, and rough mixes of in-progress songs. An auto racing photographer for many years, he would occasionally pull out his camera and hit the shutter during recording sessions and concerts.

After uncovering her father’s trove of photo negatives, Cimcie bought a light box and began examining the contents of each and every envelope, which totaled more than 800 images. The vast majority dated from 1972 to ’74, capturing moments in the studio throughout the making of Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Pretzel Logic, as well as a smattering of live shows.

“There was a moment when I got really emotional,” Cimcie says. “I was like, Omigod, there are hundreds of Steely Dan negatives. It was like finding treasure.”

Those photographs will be exhibited publicly for the first time during an event at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles on June 3. The program, titled “Reelin' in the Early Years of Steely Dan,” includes a panel discussion, moderated by Cimcie and me, featuring founding Steely Dan guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, legendary studio guitarist Dean Parks (who played on five Steely Dan albums), vocalist Royce Jones, former ABC/Dunhill A&R chief Steve Barri, and Bruce Robb, cofounder of Cherokee Studios, where Steely Dan recorded portions of Pretzel Logic.

“I’m excited to finally share my dad’s photos, hundreds of them, with the fans in a way that is thoughtful and brings together Steely Dan’s collaborators to tell the stories behind the images and celebrate the band’s origin story,” Cimcie says. Limited-edition prints will also be available for purchase.

The Nichols photo archive comes as a revelation in large part because Steely Dan, despite wide radio airplay and multi-platinum album sales, were one of the least documented popular rock groups of the 1970s. Becker and Fagen never plastered their faces on Steely Dan’s album covers, preferring to remain in the shadows. Aside from a few television appearances, virtually no footage of the group playing live during that era has been released. In photo shoots for magazines and newspapers, Becker and Fagen look to be enjoying the process about as much as they like having teeth extracted.

Roger’s candids, on the other hand, offer a view of Steely Dan like we’ve never seen them: unguarded in their natural habitat within the confines of the studio. In a series of stunning shots taken during the recording of Countdown to Ecstasy, he finds Dias, Becker, Fagen, and producer Gary Katz leaning over the mixing console, cigarettes in hand. You get a sense of both the rich creative tension and the mind-numbing tedium that was the Steely Dan recording experience.

Roger shot things that I assumed I’d never see: Fagen noodling on an electric guitar between takes on Can’t Buy a Thrill; Parks, drummer Jim Gordon, and bassist Wilton Felder laying down tracks on Pretzel Logic; drummer Jeff Porcaro, then only 19 years old, napping on a couch.

He also had an eye for the studio still-life. He found beauty in a console crowded with empty soda cans, rotary telephones, and ashtrays; knots of cables converging in a patchbay; the illuminated panels that made up the technologies of his trade.

There are some shots of Roger, too. Then in his late 20s, the California native is ruggedly handsome with fair hair and piercing blue eyes—a record exec’s idea of a rock band front man.

“I had never seen photos of him in the studio from that time,” Cimcie tells me. “There just aren’t many other photos of Steely Dan in the studio in the ’70s. This is pretty much it. No one else had a camera.”

“Reelin' in the Early Years of Steely Dan” will be held at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles on June 3 at 7 p.m.

There’s a lot of talk these days about a “male loneliness epidemic.” This may very well be a serious crisis, and I don’t mean to be flip, but men complaining about feeling sad and isolated is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Listen to music from the 1970s and early ’80s, and you will hear some of the all-time loneliest-sounding sonsabitches spilling their guts into very expensive microphones.

In the introduction to my recently published interview with Bill LaBounty, a master of this particular vein of emo AOR, I wrote, “LaBounty wasn’t making music to help listeners through bad breakups. He was instead creating the ultimate soundtrack for wallowing.”

The tracks on this mixtape feature wallowing aplenty—heartsick guys luxuriating in their own very deep feelings. Some try to look on the bright side but can’t see through the haze of melancholy. Others seem consumed by bitterness, jealousy, even fantasies of revenge. Whatever it is that’s bothering them, these fellas are getting it out of their systems and onto magnetic tape.

Maybe, just maybe, these songs point to one possible cure for our modern-day male loneliness epidemic: a guitar.

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I hadn’t yet taken a sip of coffee this morning when I received an email alerting me to a splashy New York Times Magazine feature: the 30 greatest living American songwriters, as decided by a panel of more than 250 “music insiders” and a half dozen Times critics.

I clicked and began thumbing through the list, which is in no particular order.

Stevie Wonder… Paul Simon… Taylor Swift…

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Brian and Eddie Holland… Dolly Parton… Diane Warren…

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Carole King… Outkast… Willie Nelson…

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Kendrick Lamar… Dylan… the Boss…

I zoomed past a photo of Smokey Robinson and his mesmerizing green eyes when my iPhone screen bounced. I’d reached the dead end of the page. Had I somehow missed him? I began the climb back up the list a bit more carefully this time.

Bad Bunny… Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis… Lana Del Rey… Valerie Simpson… Mariah Carey… Stephin Merritt… Babyface… Fiona Apple… Young Thug… Lionel Richie… Missy Elliott… Jay-Z… Lucinda Williams…

Where, I wondered, is the magnificent one, the one and only one, Mr. Steely Dan and whatever?

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At his commercial peak in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Bill LaBounty became a kind of avatar of boomer divorce. His best songs dwell on the emotional fallout of very adult relationships: fractured trust, obsessive jealousy, loss of identity, the ache of memory, even the desire for revenge. At the center of each tale of woe is his voice: soulful but slightly cracked, as if he’s been up all night crying. LaBounty wasn’t making music to help listeners through bad breakups. He was instead creating the ultimate soundtrack for wallowing.

His pain wasn’t a put-on. A particularly messy divorce provided enough material to fill four albums, which he recorded with some of the most elite studio musicians in Los Angeles.

“They always say you should write what you know, and if all you know is having your heart broken, that’s a good place to start,” LaBounty told me during an interview last February at a dimly lit bar and grill he frequents near his home in southwest Nashville.

It wasn’t long ago that LaBounty came to believe he was more or less retired from music. He turned to other pursuits, including his lifelong passion for cartooning, and with a partner launched a digital greeting card business as an outlet for his art. But today marks his comeback, as he releases his first LP in 12 years, Love at the End of the World.

He recorded the album in Paris with members of the French Steely Dan tribute group Dr Wu. Their musicianship, arrangements, and production prowess have given the project a level of sophistication and polish that rivals LaBounty’s early L.A. records. Now in his 70s, LaBounty is still singing about heartache, but after decades of a contented marriage to songwriter Beckie Foster, his lens has widened beyond the domestic. On songs such as “People Are Human,” “Keep the Planet Spinning,” and the album’s title track, he acknowledges the struggle to forge bonds and maintain sanity amid the storms of modern life.

Over fish tacos, LaBounty spoke in depth for the first time about how the breakup of his first marriage informed his divorce-core classics. He also talked about his regard for Steely Dan, his collaborations with Jeff Porcaro and other session players, and the circumstances that led to his return to the studio.

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Break out the hats and hooters: Steely Dan’s Alive in America is being released today on vinyl for the first time. The 1995 album, documenting the band’s return to live performance after an absence of nearly 20 years, has been refashioned as a 180-gram double LP in a limited-edition pressing of 4,000 being sold as a Record Store Day exclusive.

Earlier this week I talked separately with two of the most revered musicians featured on Alive in America, drummer Peter Erskine and bassist Tom Barney, who shared their experiences on the 1993 and ’94 tours captured on the album. Erskine was speaking from his home in California on the heels of this month’s release of Peregrine, an album he recorded with pianist Alan Pasqua and bassist Scott Colley. Barney was calling from New York, where he has played in the orchestra for The Lion King musical on Broadway for nearly 30 years.

They spoke about the pressures of serving as the rhythmic backbone of Steely Dan’s comeback, the thrills and quirks of playing with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and why “Fuck Bernard Purdie!” was once given as a performance note.

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In April 1976, the song “Moonlight Feels Right,” by an obscure Atlanta band named after a character from Moby-Dick, made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100. By the middle of that summer, the first single from Starbuck would peak at number 3, and it has never really gone away. We’ve been basking in its soft, synthy glow now for half a century.

From the moment it entered the charts, “Moonlight Feels Right” was lumped into the shaggy, mid-’70s AM gold now peddled in the wee small hours on Time Life compilation infomercials. But what separates Starbuck from the likes of Bread is that beyond the music’s slick surface listeners can find sly pop subversion—a distinctive sonic palette of Moog and marimba, artfully deployed innuendo cut through with a mischievous sense of humor. Think less Air Supply, more 10cc.

Back in December 2022, Starbuck front man and songwriter Bruce Blackman spoke over the phone from his home in Georgia about the creation and long life of his career-defining hit. With the 50th anniversary of the first chart appearance of “Moonlight” approaching on April 17, it seemed high time to finally publish our conversation. Blackman goes deep on the freak accident that preceded him writing the song, his romantic pursuit of the woman who inspired the lyrics, his shoe-leather promotional campaign for radio airplay, and the rushed recording session that yielded the finest mallet solo in all of pop music history.

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At a rehearsal for the New York Rock and Soul Revue in 1992, Donald Fagen had just kicked into Steely Dan’s “My Old School” on his Fender Rhodes when he heard something amiss. The maestro signaled to the band to stop and yelled across the stage to the keyboardist Scott Healy, who was a substitute on Hammond B3 organ that day and would soon join the house band for the nascent Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “He said that I was rushing,” Healy recently recalled. “And I was.”

Fourteen years later, Healy found himself seated across from Fagen once more, this time as a journalist on assignment. In the first of his few feature stories for Keyboard magazine, Healy spoke to Fagen in February 2006, on the eve of the release of Morph the Cat, the final installment in Fagen’s so-called Nightfly Trilogy.

“I remember the interview well, because I was so nervous,” Healy told me the other day. “He really lit up when I started asking about jazz and his influences.” Keyboard had arranged for a Rhodes to be delivered to the room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City where they met, giving Healy the chance to go deep on music theory with one of his heroes. “That was my favorite part,” he says. “I felt we were connecting about this stuff, and I asked him questions that I’d always wanted answered regarding Steely Dan chords and harmony and how he approaches playing the piano, and also his unique approach to chord voicings and sounds.”

I’ve long considered Healy’s piece one of the most distinctive Fagen interviews, because it captures two pros talking shop. A few weeks ago, I reached out to Healy to ask if he had held onto a recording of the conversation. After some searching, he sent me a photo of a RadioShack microcassette tape. On the label, he had scrawled Fagen’s name in pencil. He kindly digitized the 20-year-old tape and agreed to share the audio with Expanding Dan.

“I ended up playing with Donald again in Woodstock, when he started showing up at Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble, where I was playing a lot. I think it was 2009. He was really into playing the blues,” Healy said. “Now I’m living in Woodstock, and he’s living right above me in Bob Dylan’s old house, where he’s been for years.”

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At the Academy Awards last Sunday, when Nicole Kidman announced One Battle After Another as Best Picture, the orchestra did not play a piece from Jonny Greenwood’s inventively jittery score. Instead the musicians kicked into a 54-year-old pop song from the film’s soundtrack: “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan. It seemed an inspired choice by the ceremony’s producers, the strings swelling as director Paul Thomas Anderson and his collaborators took the stage to accept the night’s top Oscar.

In One Battle, Anderson drops the needle on “Dirty Work” as the narrative leaps forward 16 years, from the incendiary days of Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the revolutionary group the French 75 to his humdrum present as a perma-stoned single parent to his teenage daughter, Willa.

I saw the film during its first week in theaters having read nothing about it, so the appearance of “Dirty Work” came as a delightful surprise. As did Bob’s subsequent reference to hanging out with a former bandmate who “bought all this old equipment from Steely Dan’s studio to try to get that sort of vintage crackling tube sound.” (PTA Danfan status: confirmed!)

At the same time, I wondered why Anderson, presumably operating with a formidable music licensing budget, had decided to pull such a well-worn track from the songbook of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. “Dirty Work” has popped up over the years in everything from Euphoria and The Sopranos to David O. Russell’s American Hustle. Meanwhile, deeper but no less affecting cuts like “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” and “Here at the Western World” and “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” and “Don’t Take Me Alive” and “Sign in Stranger” and “The Royal Scam” and “Home at Last” and “Time Out of Mind” and “Third World Man” all sit virtually untouched by Hollywood’s music supervisors.

But the more I thought about “Dirty Work” in relation to One Battle After Another, the more fitting it seemed. The combination of Wurlitzer electric piano and Hammond B3 organ carries an undeniable emotional charge. It’s an instant mood-setter. And although the song is told from the perspective of a guy who is some woman’s on-call side piece when her man is out of town, it nonetheless conveys the generalized sense of paranoia and resignation felt by DiCaprio’s Bob, who foresees terrible trouble but seems to have lost the desire he once had as a younger man to fight for substantive change.

After One Battle’s triumphant night at the Oscars, I was compelled to revisit other films whose soundtracks or scores include music by Becker and/or Fagen. This is not meant to be an exhaustive inventory. Some intentional omissions include You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat, Peter Locke’s 1971 hippie flick, which is presumed lost (though my hunt for it continues in earnest); documentaries such as I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not and The Kid Stays in the Picture; and the 2000 Farrelly brothers joint Me, Myself & Irene, whose soundtrack is packed with Dan covers by the likes of Wilco, Ben Folds Five, and (sigh) Smash Mouth. The list includes masterpieces and flops, romantic comedies, family fare, even experimental animation.

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Earlier this month Donald Fagen made a rare appearance on the internet. He was spotted in the background of a video his stepdaughter Amy Helm posted on social media to promote the Helm Family Midnight Ramble. The event is a sort of jam session in Woodstock, New York, and in the absence of new Steely Dan tour dates, Fagen has become a regular participant. In Helm’s video, he wears dark sunglasses and coolly chews gum without so much as acknowledging the presence of the camera.

At age 78, the maestro is more or less terminally offline. Walter Becker was the more internet savvy member of Steely Dan, and since his death in 2017, the band’s official online footprint has amounted to little more than a rarely updated Facebook page and a stagnant website. But even as the group has little formal web presence, they are, paradoxically, well-suited for a moment when humorous viral imagery has become cultural currency. As Alex Pappademas put it in the must-read book Quantum Criminals, “Steely Dan are an endlessly meme-able band because they’re a hilarious concept on paper—two grumpy-looking guys obsessed with making the smoothest music of all time.”

That memetic quality is among the reasons the recent Steely Dan revival, the so-called Danaissance, took root online in the early 2020s. Photographs of Becker, Fagen, and their associates make easy grist for the social media mill. Over the years I’ve developed a habit of pulling these offbeat, often low-resolution JPEGs into a folder on my computer’s desktop. The collection has grown to more than 350 images. Many of them have become familiar to denizens of the digital Daniverse.

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When the writer Alison Rose died last September at the age of 81, she was remembered as “The New Yorker’s femme fatale.” First employed at the magazine as a receptionist, the erstwhile model became romantically entangled with at least three of the publication’s married writers. Rose later became a New Yorker contributor herself and candidly chronicled the ups and downs of those relationships in the buzzy 1996 article “How I Became a Single Woman,” which led to her publishing a memoir, Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, in 2004.

“She so took the dive when she profiled somebody,” filmmaker James L. Brooks told The Times, referring in part to Rose’s exhaustive article on Albert Brooks, which is as funny as it is penetrating. But as a New Yorker writer, she was far better known for her Talk of the Town pieces—relatively breezy vignettes packed with in-the-moment reportage and vivid detail.

For the Talk story “Survival of the Hippest,” published in June 1993 and shared below, Rose hung out with Donald Fagen as he was putting the finishing touches on his second solo album, Kamakiriad. Having fallen asleep while listening to the record, Rose wakes up and remembers Fagen telling her about a nightmare: his girlfriend thinks he’s ugly! The piece never totally shakes off the feel of a lightly surreal dream. Walter Becker makes a brief appearance, singing malt-shop pop alongside his songwriting partner, and at the end of the evening Rose and Fagen share an affectionate farewell that seems almost too cinematic to believe.

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Survival of the Hippest

By Alison Rose

The New Yorker (June 7, 1993)

I fell asleep listening to “Kamakiriad” one night and woke up at 5 a.m. in a panic, and remembered Donald Fagen talking about his nightmares. Donald, of course, is an intellectual rock-and-roller—one half of Steely Dan. At the time he talked about his nightmares, he had been in the next-to-last stages of making the “Kamakiriad” album. “I had a nightmare the other night that my girlfriend said I was ugly,” Donald said, with no trace of expression in his voice. His spirit is in slower motion than other people’s. “And I kept protesting that I used to be ugly, but I wasn’t ugly anymore. And she was saying that I was still ugly.” Donald, who has a full, melodica player’s mouth, was hunched over, in a short black leather jacket, and he looked like a cross between Seymour Glass and Montgomery Clift.

“When I toured with Steely Dan, in the early seventies,” Donald said, “I used to have recurring dreams that someone in the front row would mimic all my gestures as I was doing them. Like, if I was singing they would open their mouth at the same time I was opening my mouth. Whatever I was doing, they would do it.”

Donald learned how to sing from his mother. “My father went to work early in the morning, leaving the two of us to fill the day, out on the Jersey frontier. She knew hundreds of songs and she sang one after another. We lived in a two-family house in Passaic. I think it was sort of a frumpy, late-forties-style house. And then we moved to this housing-development thing, and it was very shocking to me.”

I lay there and remembered Donald in his recording studio, on a gray sofa with pink flecks in it, saying, “I used to take the bus in to New York. I’d go to the Village Vanguard or this place called Slugs. At the Vanguard, they put me on the kiddie banquettes, there near the drums. I saw Charlie Mingus there once. I had a little conversation with the piano player Jaki Byard, you know, and I asked him a few musical questions and he was really nice to me. And occasionally I’d miss the last bus, which was at one-thirty, I think, and I’d sleep on a bench in the Port Authority.”

I remembered one night at the Paramount Hotel with Donald. Walter Becker, the other half of Steely Dan, was there. Walter has what Donald calls “this blond, Aryan-looking complexion.” Walter produced “Kamakiriad” and plays guitar on it. Donald and Walter are like one person. I asked which one wrote the Steely Dan lyric where the sailor “blacked out on the stairs,” and Walter said, “We both did.” I asked them to sing “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” for me, and they sang a few bars of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man.” I asked Walter what he really thought about Donald, and he said, “Somewhere between Dinah Shore and the Marquis de Sade.”

At around eleven-thirty that night, outside the Paramount, Walter was waving goodbye, and Donald gave me a quick kiss. He said my lipstick tasted like “little Jewish candies.” I remembered that, and how he had said that though he still had nightmares, “if I can make it to the studio without being hit by a Plymouth Fury, I’m all right.”

Then I got up, had some coffee, and went to work.

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At the Grammy Awards on February 21, 2001, Eminem seemed to be on everybody’s mind. Protesters from GLAAD rallied outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles, holding signs featuring the high-flying rapper’s scowling face beside the words “HATE SET TO A GROOVE IS STILL HATE.”

“He’s very good at what he does, but he’s also a misogynist, a homophobe, a racist, and an anti-Semite,” said Moby, who performed during the award show with Jill Scott and Blue Man Group—a stark reminder that the events of that evening took place a full quarter century ago.

The controversy stemmed, of course, from the often twisted lyrics of Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, which would ultimately take the Best Rap Album statue. Still, “When Stevie Wonder and Bette Midler announced the winner for Album of the Year at last night’s 43rd Annual Grammy Awards, the real Slim Shady was not asked to stand up. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan were, after which they were handed the coveted award for Two Against Nature, their first new studio album in two decades,” Richard Skanse wrote in his Rolling Stone recap. (The other nominees included Kid A by Radiohead and Midnite Vultures by Beck.) Becker, Fagen, and their engineers would finish the night undefeated in three other categories: Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical; Best Pop Vocal Album; and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals (for “Cousin Dupree”).

The irony seemed lost on nearly everyone that Eminem was taking flak for cooking up vile scenarios as a lyricist while Steely Dan were being rewarded for a song about a ne’er-do-well former ska keyboardist hitting on his young cousin. Jon Pareles was the rare critic to acknowledge this as something of a double standard, and he explored its contours in a New York Times column published before the 2001 Grammys:

Steely Dan’s songwriters, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, get a free pass from the watchdogs of content because it’s understood that they are, like most artists, professional liars, otherwise known as storytellers. Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen, like many novelists, screenwriters and playwrights, create sleazeballs and empathize enough to make them believable. …

It’s widely accepted that “Janie Runaway” doesn’t mean Steely Dan endorses statutory rape. Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen happen to be curious about how their character would coax his “wonderwaif,” about his rationalizations and self-delusions, about the ways a conscience can warp to accept repulsive actions. They also like the perverse frisson of wrapping a creepy monologue in highbrow chord changes and luxuriously nonchalant arrangements.

Steely Dan’s music isn’t abrasive like hip-hop. It’s at the opposite extreme, cool and enticing. Some listeners might even find themselves singing along with deeply unsavory come-ons. The group’s audience, mostly boomer-age adults, considers itself sophisticated enough to handle a few ironies and the concept of an unreliable narrator, and the music goes down so smoothly that it seems perfectly genteel. Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen are punctilious pop craftsmen who have spent a long time in the music business. So Steely Dan is granted literary license. …

Eminem gets no such leeway. … Where Steely Dan uses insinuation and indirection, Eminem is bluntly antagonistic; where Steely Dan lives for understatement, Eminem goes for hyperbole.

A week after the Grammys, Eminem once again went for hyperbole. While collecting a Brit Award for Best International Male Artist, he made it clear he had not forgotten about his recent upset at the hands of our jazz-rock heroes. “And the winner is… Steely Dan!” the 28-year-old yelled, hoisting the trophy. “Who the fuck are Steely Dan?”

Becker and Fagen were later asked whether the Eminem hubbub had taken some of the enjoyment out of their Grammys glory. “No, it was great that he was taking the heat,” Fagen said. “We didn’t get that kind of soul-killing exposure you get when you really hit the jackpot.”

“It’s lucky for us,” Becker added, “thinking as we do, that what we do essentially defies the kind of large-scale, commercial reification that has been given to people like Eminem. We believe that finding yourself in that position tends to undercut your ability to function as artists and as human beings.”

No rock music figure before or since, one has to assume, ever uttered the words commercial reification.

“But that’s Walter—that vocabulary, that wit,” says Dave Russell, who served as chief engineer at Becker’s Maui studio, Hyperbolic Sound. “That’s why I always thought, What am I doing in this mix of intellects? I guess they just liked me.”

They certainly did, as Russell became a key member of the Steely Dan studio corps in the 1990s and early 2000s. He helped engineer Fagen’s Kamakiriad, Becker’s 11 Tracks of Whack, as well as Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go. At the 2001 Grammys, he was inside the Staples Center collecting statues alongside his Dan brethren and heading out to the parties after the ceremony. Over the phone recently from his longtime home in Maui, Russell talked about that tense and triumphant night 25 years ago when, for the first and only time, Steely Dan was the belle of the music industry ball.

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At the 2001 Grammy Awards, the producer Larry Klein was seated beside his ex-wife, Joni Mitchell. Though the two had been divorced for several years, they kept up a fruitful working relationship. That evening inside the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, co-produced by Klein, would win Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

What Klein remembers most fondly from that ceremony 25 years ago is not his own award but the moment Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature triumphed over Eminem and Radiohead in the Album of the Year category.

“When they announced that Steely Dan had won,” he says, “you could see there was dissension among the ranks of the other nominees who were sitting around us.” Klein and “Joanie” (as he calls Mitchell) had long admired the music of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and they were among the minority in the room who were thrilled. “We immediately stood up and gave them a standing ovation very conspicuously,” he says. “I think that they felt grateful for that in some way or another.”

When the dust settled after the ceremony, Klein introduced himself to Becker. They got to talking and hit it off. “It was one of those things you have with certain people: you meet and it feels like you’ve known each other most of your lives,” he says. “After that we started corresponding over e-mail and talking on the phone a few times a week, sometimes every day, just kind of rambling philosophical discourse and comedic improvisational explorations. Whenever Walter happened to be coming through L.A. or I was in New York, we’d get together for dinner and always had a great time with each other no matter the context. At a certain point he said, ‘Would you want to cowrite and produce my next solo record?’ I was kind of shocked. I said, ‘Wow, let me think about that for a second.’ So I thought about it for a moment and said, ‘Absolutely, let’s do it.’” Out of that partnership would come 2008’s Circus Money, Becker’s final album before his death at the age of 67 in 2017.

“We would alternate writing jags in Manhattan, Los Angeles and Maui. Each jag would be about a week long, and be assisted by the presence of large quantities of wine and other pharmaceutical elements,” Klein wrote last year in a poignant remembrance of his friendship and collaboration with Becker that he published in his newsletter, Strange Cargo. Still, there were plenty of questions I wanted to ask him about the making of Circus Money. Over the phone recently from his home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, Klein went deep on the reggae records that formed the album’s backbone, the insights he gathered about Becker and Fagen’s songwriting process, and the feeling Becker had that Steely Dan’s analytical studio methods “killed a lot of the soul and joy of making a record.”

Strange Cargo

Autobiographical And Philosophical Prose Writings, Stories, And Wanderings From A Musician/ Songwriter and Record Producer

By Larry Klein

To read more of Larry Klein’s reflections on music and life, be sure to subscribe to his newsletter, Strange Cargo.

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have been paid more than a few compliments.

Before he passed away last year, the musician Barney Hurley and I enjoyed sending each other Steely Dan soundalikes. These weren’t songs that were consciously copping a Dan-esque vibe, like Billy Joel’s “Zanzibar,” nor were they affectionate homages along the lines of Ween’s “Pandy Fackler.” These were, as Hurley put it when defining the terms of our little parlor game, “tracks that are impersonating Steely Dan, downright plagiarizing them.”

For a song to make the cut, it had to blatantly borrow a melodic or rhythmic motif from a Becker-Fagen composition (solo albums included). Unsurprisingly, many of these rip-offs came from artists in the Japanese jazz-rock subgenre city pop, who are known for their preoccupation with Steely Dan. Others came from library music catalogs and dark corners of the audiophile internet. Hurley had a truffle hound’s sense for locating these buried treasures that was astounding. For every song I would email to him, he would fill my inbox with them in return.

For this mixtape I’ve compiled some of my favorite secondhand Dan from the 1970s to as recent as 2019. It’s by no means an exhaustive collection; I may send out another batch or two in future newsletters.

Though some listeners may turn up their noses at the unoriginality inherent in these songs, not to mention the IP theft, it seems only fair that artists over the years have cribbed from the Dan catalog. Becker and Fagen themselves were known to lift without explicit attribution, whether it be Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” for “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” or Keith Jarrett’s “‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours” for “Gaucho.”

“We steal,” Fagen bluntly told Musician’s David Breskin in 1980. “We’re the robber barons of rock ’n’ roll, you know.”

Think of it as the karmic wheel turnin' ’round and ’round.

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Interviewing Steely Dan was never a gimme.

The trouble, as dozens of journalists would learn over the years, was that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had a tendency to treat on-the-record conversations as a venue for their two-man comedy routine. While their bits were often very entertaining, reporters could be left wondering how they were going to cobble together a coherent story from a bunch of inside jokes, arcane literary references, and cryptic half-answers.

As a result, truly candid interviews with Becker and Fagen are relatively rare. However, the Dan men were inclined to dial down the highbrow smartassery if they perceived the person sitting across from them with a tape recorder as something of an intellectual equal. That, I believe, is why David Breskin’s Q&A with Becker and Fagen from Musician in 1980 is the gold standard. Breskin was unmistakably sharp, and his knowledge of jazz ran deep; Becker and Fagen couldn’t peg him as some rock-rag hack who was going to ask, for the umpteenth time, “Was Chevy Chase really in your band at Bard?”

You can sense a similar meeting of the minds in Hank Shteamer’s 2008 interview with Becker for Time Out New York, which was conducted two weeks before the release of Becker’s second and final solo album, Circus Money. Seated on a couch at the S.I.R. rehearsal space in New York City, where Steely Dan was preparing for its Think Fast summer tour, Shteamer proceeded to ask Becker a bunch of exceptional questions: What can you do on a solo album that you can’t do with Steely Dan? Why is the West such a fruitful theme in your songwriting? When did you discover that the demimonde was an attractive world to draw from?

Mr. Shteamer was kind enough to digitize and share with his fellow Expanding Dan subscribers the never-before-heard recording of his 70-minute encounter with the guitar-playing half of Steely Dan. Despite some audible background commotion and a couple spots with minor tape speed issues, what’s clear is that Becker recognizes he’s talking to a professional music scribe whose curiosity isn’t going to be satisfied by canned answers. The 58-year-old opens up to an uncommon degree about his desire to write and record music apart from his longtime collaboration with Fagen; his feelings about Steely Dan being lumped into the then-novel yacht rock category with the likes of Christopher Cross (“somebody who’s probably the furthest from where we are”); and how the experience of hearing his and Fagen’s subversive jazz-pop on mainstream radio is “the greatest thrill that you can possibly have.”

To get more of Hank Shteamer’s outstanding music journalism, be sure to sign up for his newsletter, Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches.

Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches

Hank Shteamer writes about music.

By Hank Shteamer

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When I emailed Chuck Klosterman to ask if he would like to have a conversation about two seemingly disparate subjects, Steely Dan and his new book, Football, he responded with a microburst of quintessentially Klostermanian wit.

“I would love to do this,” the cultural critic and longtime Expanding Dan subscriber wrote, “though I realize there are limits to the connection between Steely Dan and football. It’s too bad ‘Glamour Profession’ wasn’t about Vince Ferragamo instead of Spencer Haywood. However, they do obviously mention the Crimson Tide, so that’s something.”

A couple weeks later, Klosterman was on the phone from his home in Portland, Oregon, and he was game to talk about America’s most popular sport as well as our foremost jazz-rock perfectionists.

“I’m in my office right now, and I have a framed black-and-white photograph of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker on my wall,” the 53-year-old said. “I’m not the kind of person who looks for inspirational quotes, but I do sometimes look at that photo, and it reminds me when I’m writing that I should keep trying, that it can get better. Don’t stop. It’s not done yet. Keep working on it. There’s always one more extraneous word that can be removed. It’s something to which I do aspire—to look at writing the way those guys looked at sound.”

Buy Football by Chuck Klosterman (Penguin Press).

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Because this is a newsletter about Steely Dan, I’d like to talk about a comparison you mention in Football that’s made between sports and jazz. Basketball is often thought of as this jazz-like improvisational sport, whereas in football each play is a completely controlled situation within which there are bursts of improvised feats of athleticism. “It’s not that basketball is jazz and football is anti-jazz, or that basketball is jazz and football is prog rock,” you write. “It’s more that basketball aspires to be jazz and football aspires to be petroleum engineering.”

I hadn’t really thought of this until now, but it’s true: When you think of the recording of Aja or Gaucho, it’s easy to think of Becker and Fagen as behaving like football coaches. They are essentially cycling through potential performers, telling them what they want, and also sometimes telling them to do it in exactly the way they want it done. For guys like Becker and Fagen who have such an admiration of jazz, they had a strange unease with improvisation. For a lot of people who love rock, they’re like, “I don’t like jazz. Steely Dan is as close as I get.” But it’s not improvisational, obviously. The idea of Mark Knopfler being brought in and only 19 seconds or whatever of his guitar work ended up on Gaucho? I mean, Mark Knopfler is not some fucking jagoff. That is an incredible thing.

Dean Parks, one of Steely Dan’s frequent session guitarists, once said, “One interesting thing about Donald and Walter is that perfection is not what they’re after. They’re after something that you want to listen to over and over again. So we would work then past the perfection point until it became natural. Until it sounded almost improvised. So it was a two-step process. One was to get to perfection. The other is to get beyond it and to loosen it up a little bit.”

As a writer you have an idea in your mind, and it’s never going to be exactly what ends up on the page. In Becker and Fagen’s case, they knew they were never going to get exactly what they wanted on tape, but they’re like, “How close can we get? Is it possible that by trying to be perfect, we might accidentally do something different that is better?” I feel like that happened on some of their songs where they had a very clear idea of what they wanted the solo to be and maybe the guy played it just slightly off, but they recognized that this is the weird abstraction that makes this profound.

They did perhaps inadvertently foster the perception that they were perfectionists. Just the amount of knowledge about “The Second Arrangement,” in which the song was recorded perfectly, the ultimate manifestation of what they wanted, and then some joker accidentally erased it and they could never recapture that again. Most artists would have been OK with coming close to replicating the song after it was erased, but it was never good enough for those guys. The perpetuation of that story does play into the possibly inaccurate assessment that perfection was all they wanted.

As a Gen X-er who grew up listening to hard rock, you were in your teens and 20s in the late 1980s and early ’90s at a time when Steely Dan’s popularity had severely waned, especially among younger listeners. How did your relationship with the music of Becker and Fagen evolve over the years, and did it involve the Minutemen’s cover of “Doctor Wu”?

Actually, it did not. In fact, I didn’t even know that the Minutemen had done that for years after it happened. But I will say this: In the 1980s, the only music I was interested in was hard rock and metal, so much so that I would not have my clock radio set to music. I set it to the alarm because I was afraid I might accidentally hear pop music. I was dogmatic about this the way you can only be when you’re a high school kid. And because of that, there were certain bands that I hated. Steely Dan was one of them. There was just this collection of artists from the ’70s—Bob Seger, Steve Miller—who didn’t have any relationship to metal and who I perceived as making the music I wanted to hear the least. I would’ve never wanted to hear the Doobie Brothers. There was this whole bunch of music that I wanted no part in.

Then I get to college in 1990. The first thing that drew me to Steely Dan was that the people I met who were really into them seemed extremely interesting. I would meet a guy and be like, It’s really intriguing. He has old ideas in some ways, but he also knows what’s going on, and he makes fun of everything. It was almost like these people had adopted the Becker-Fagen persona. The greatest-hits album Gold was the first Steely Dan album I got. I had heard all those songs while growing up and never cared that much about any of them, but I started to realize how rewarding it was to listen to their music closely. I’m the seventh kid in my family, so I have brothers and sisters who are 18 years older, and I would hear things like the song “FM,” and I would imagine that it was the music they must play in singles bars. There was a show called Three’s Company, and they used to go to a bar called the Regal Beagle. And I could imagine that the music there would be “FM” by Steely Dan.

The more I listened to Steely Dan, the more I realized these guys were funny. But it was funny the way Spinal Tap was funny. It wasn’t funny in a way that made you laugh out loud. It was funny in a way that made you say, “That’s funny.” It wasn’t joking at all, but it was hilarious. Then I got the [Citizen Steely Dan] box set, and I started to appreciate how difficult it is to make something complicated feel simple. That’s one of the things that Becker and Fagen do that’s just so ungodly brilliant—their ability to do things that I know are complicated and yet, at first listen, it just seems completely straightforward like normal radio music. From that period on, when people ask me who my favorite bands are, I say my two favorite bands are Kiss and the Beatles, but level two is Steely Dan and Black Sabbath. Those are the four bands that I care about the most.

My relationship with Steely Dan also became a huge element of my friendship with my coworkers at Spin when I got to the magazine in 2002. I was coming from Akron, Ohio, and I had this fear that I’m going to go to this magazine and every person who works there is going to be so hip and so contrarian and into only the coolest thing happening at that moment. But as it turned out, we all just wanted to talk about Steely Dan, and it was great. We’d go to the bar and then head back to someone’s apartment and there would always be an argument over which Steely Dan record to play. A bunch of us went to see Steely Dan at the Beacon Theatre, when they were playing certain albums live in full, and we had a huge dispute over which record we wanted to see.

Around that same time, the Yacht Rock series debuted.

I would say that was the period when it became too OK to say you like Steely Dan. There’s a Judd Apatow movie [Knocked Up from 2007] where there’s an argument about Steely Dan—Paul Rudd’s character likes Steely Dan and Seth Rogen’s character doesn’t like Steely Dan. That’s when I was like, “I guess this has really moved into a different phase now. Never again will anyone ever be surprised by someone like me liking Steely Dan.” And it had to be satisfying for Becker and Fagen in some sense. They weren’t guys who were easily satisfied, but there had to have been some satisfaction in that period to realize not only was their music being reevaluated, but it was being done by the people who seemingly cared about music the most. It wasn’t like when “Bohemian Rhapsody” got used in Wayne’s World and that song became massive, and now people who had never previously considered Queen their kind of music suddenly like Queen. The people who reassessed Steely Dan seemed like people who’d been thinking about it for 30 years and finally were like, “OK, yes, it’s great.”

I’ve always thought one interesting thing about Steely Dan was that the more isolated and obsessive and indulgent they became, they managed to create work that was increasingly commercially successful.

And we associate Steely Dan with being in the studio forever perfecting things on the most granular level, but they put out a record in ’72, ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76, and ’77. They were in the studio for a long time, but you can’t say they weren’t prolific. When Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine disappeared for all those years [after Loveless] and then finally came back, the album he came back with [m b v] wasn’t as good as the thing he’d left off with, but also it felt like he had completely separated himself from the idea of being a commercial musician. I am particularly drawn to geniuses who also want to be conventionally commercial, because I can’t think of something that’s much more difficult, and Steely Dan never stopped being commercial. There’s no album in their catalog where you can say, “Well, this is the record where all they cared about was the art. They didn’t give a shit if it sold at all.” They were never like that. I love Eddie Van Halen, and one of the things I think is amazing about Eddie Van Halen is that his work never starts bleeding over into prog rock. He was never like, “This is not going to be a rock record. I’m going to do all John Fahey acoustic stuff.” He was always like, “I’m making rock music for a four-piece rock band. I’m a genius trapped inside of this paradigm, and that’s what it’s going to be.” That’s how I feel about Steely Dan, too—that Becker and Fagen are masters of doing the most sophisticated version of something that can still be on Top 40 radio.

It’s hard to find other examples of that where it happens so often for so many years. I mean, there are many examples where someone who is not a conventional pop artist, who’s really seen more as an avant-garde individual, makes a song and crosses over with a hit single that is an interesting little footnote to their career. The Butthole Surfers, for example, had a song [“Pepper”] that was on the Billboard charts. But Steely Dan is not like that. Steely Dan is like, “We do this thing where we’re trying to make these records as flawless as possible. We’re thinking about musical ideas that are very complicated. We’re using lyrics that will not make sense. And then if we’re asked to explain them, our explanation will not be helpful. Yet our music is going to be on the radio.”

I did an interview with Donald Fagen when I was at the Akron Beacon Journal, and I asked him the meaning of various songs, and it was completely a waste of time. I asked him about “Time Out of Mind,” and he’s like, Oh, we didn’t think anyone would know that the obscure term “chase the dragon” was about heroin.

I actually turned up that piece in a newspaper archive search.

I’m sure you saw the humiliating aspect of that story. I don’t even like admitting this, but there was a copyediting issue, and I spelled Donald Fagen’s name wrong for the whole goddamn piece. But you know how many complaints we got? Not one. I was writing stories every day, so of course I made mistakes. But to this day, I have to believe that Fagen’s name got changed by the copy desk.

Read Klosterman’s interview with Fagen in the Akron Beacon Journal from June 2000.

Chuck Klosterman On Steely Dan Akron Beacon Journal June 2000

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You wrote an interesting essay for Esquire some years back about the value of having a nemesis. And to Steely Dan, the Eagles served that role in the ’70s, even though they shared a manager in Irving Azoff.

My take has always been that the Eagles want to be Steely Dan’s rivals, and Steely Dan doesn’t care. I’ve always thought that the Eagles were excited Steely Dan mentioned them in “Everything You Did,” that the Eagles saw the fact that Steely Dan cared enough to namecheck them in a song as a compliment, even if it was done pejoratively. And Steely Dan, I would guess, didn’t care that the Eagles mentioned “steely knives” in “Hotel California.”

In your book I Wear the Black Hat, you write about how for many years you despised the Eagles until you woke up one day and realized you were no longer able to hate rock bands. I experienced a similar evolution. I can now enjoy many Eagles songs, but back in the late ’90s and early aughts I think I watched The Big Lebowski one too many times and internalized the Dude’s “I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man” sentiment.

That actually affected me too. I’m embarrassed to say that now because it’s the most non-musical reason for having an opinion about music. But I was warped by the idea that a person who sees the world in this way sees the Eagles as the single worst thing to listen to. It actually made me a little more interested in the Eagles, and also more performatively against them. And then at some point that eroded too, and I matured out of that phase. We always want to believe that when we’re stating our opinions, we’re talking strictly about the music. But that’s almost never the case. The reason rock music was such a meaningful art form, besides being the only art form specifically for young people, is that it had all of these ancillary meanings. So, of course, there’s also the subjective effect of injecting your feelings into the music.

When we started talking about the Eagles and the importance of a nemesis, I initially thought you were going to talk about the Steely Dan song “My Rival.”

I love that song. The imagery is fantastic, but for some reason it’s often seen as the weakest track on Gaucho.

To me, it feels like the template for what would become a lot of Hold Steady songs. The way Fagen describes the rival seems like how Craig Finn would describe the guy. Gaucho, for a very long time, was my favorite Steely Dan record. Maybe part of the reason I felt that way is because rock critics dismissed it for being too slick. It seemed to be for a lot of people writing about music a bridge too far. Too polished. But I think that the number of good songs on Gaucho might be the most of any of their records.

It’s defensible. Particularly among very online younger people, Gaucho has become the most popular of all the Dan albums.

This is fascinating to me. So Aja is not that record?

There’s something about Gaucho. Maybe it’s the lore around it as the zenith of their maniacal obsession with perfection, or the fact that it was shrouded in Becker’s drug addiction. All the drama behind the scenes might give it some kind of extramusical appeal.

For me these days, if somebody says, “Let’s listen to Steely Dan,” I reach for The Royal Scam. That’s the record I tend to want to hear now. That was not the record I would’ve picked from them even 10 years ago. Like the Beatles and to some extent the Grateful Dead, one of the upsides to Steely Dan is that you can hear a song for 25 years, and then suddenly one day it’s like, “Oh, ‘The Caves of Altamira’ is my favorite song.” A lot of people have this experience with Steely Dan, where you age into your appreciation of the music, and that’s really satisfying.

Turning to Football, you frame the book as intended for a reader in a future society in which football has receded from the culture to help that person understand why the sport was once so dominant in American life. What inspired you to adopt this approach?

The main thing is that my intent was to write about football in a way that discusses its meaning almost as if that meaning has passed. Because I do have this fear—and I have this fear about lots of things about culture—that as the world changes and as these things recede from the collective understanding of what they are, attempts to describe why something was important end up being conducted by people who are distant from the experience itself. So they look back on something and extrapolate meaning, and that meaning is always at least partially inaccurate to those people who actually experienced it. If I try to write about the Bronze Age, for example, I’m not going to really be able to capture the inner lives of the Bronze Age citizen.

So I wanted to do a book for this hypothetical person in the future to get a sense of what the present is really like. My book But What If We’re Wrong created the idea in my mind of doing books that are intended to one day serve as resources about the past. But another thing is that the book-publishing industry—publishing in general—is going through a complicated period, where now the assumption is that anything that’s happening in the present can really only be addressed by things like podcasts or Substack newsletters or social media. The idea of writing about something current in a book that then comes out a year later is really antithetical to the way culture operates. You want the book to be interesting to the person who’s buying it now, but that person may have the expectation that you wrote this a year ago, and it is already old. So as an author, you almost have to correct for that.

It’s so tempting when you’re writing a nonfiction book to make references to Trump, for example, because he seems to infiltrate everything, or to make references to Taylor Swift, because she’s the last extension of the monoculture, or to any of these things that seem to be the last remaining residue of a culture everyone shares. But those things are what date a publication or date a book. In But What If We’re Wrong, I think I only mentioned Trump once, but I regret that I did, because it ties the book to a very specific moment and I’m increasingly trying to get away from doing work that seems essentially interlocked with the world in which I wrote it in.

One of the through lines of the book is your notion that football, however popular it is today, is ultimately doomed. “In the same way imagining the end of the world is easier than imagining the end of capitalism,” you write, “it’s easier to envision a dystopia where football is omnipresent than a utopia where autumn weekends are filled with nothing except sweaters and pumpkins.” So how do you envision football essentially falling off a cliff?

Part of it has to do with the idea that the sheer size of football makes it fragile. Right now football is more popular in the United States than every other sport combined. So it would almost seem as though the likelihood of football swallowing up all the other sports is greater than it disappearing. But the largeness of football demands it never stop increasing in size. You’ll hear something described as “too big to fail.” Well, the NFL is too big to stop growing, and nothing that large can exist in perpetuity, because as the culture changes the big things become more vulnerable than the small things. If you use the analogy of the end of the dinosaurs, the largest dinosaurs were the most at risk after the asteroid hit. The small ones could find ways to survive.

The other thing is that even though football is increasingly popular, the relationship people have to the game itself is constantly decreasing. Fewer and fewer kids play football. For a lot of parents, the idea that they would let their kid play this dangerous sport when there are so many other options—it’s almost like you’d be seen as a bad parent, in some people’s minds, for doing that. So while football is expanding as an entertainment entity, it’s eroding as a social glue of community life. My vision is that when the largeness of football causes this cataclysmic failure, there will not be a superstructure underneath that will say, “We’ve got to save this.” I don’t think that football in the future will have the meaning to people’s lives the way it does now, in particular the way it did in the recent past. Football is important because it really describes American culture in the 20th century, but we’re no longer in the 20th century. So modern football, the modern NFL, is the football of the past on autopilot, and it’s still skyrocketing forward, but the thing that made football important is no longer part of American lives.

You write extensively about the marriage of football to television, and how an eventual decline of advertising on TV may affect football more than our aversion to the CTE-inducing violence of the sport.

The first big essay in the book is about football’s relationship to television, which in many ways is a semiotic argument. It doesn’t really seem to be about football as much as it is about the experience of television and how television works for the consumer. Now, all the details in it are about football games and the way football is filmed and all of these things, but it’s a little strange in that I think somebody who might read that chapter on football and television might say, “Well, this seems more like communication theory. This doesn’t really seem like football.” I was tempted to move that essay deeper into the book because I had the idea that maybe I should really front-load some of whatever hardcore football stuff is in this book, but I ended up believing that would be wrong because the most important thing should be addressed first.

Television, you write, is accidentally the perfect way to consume a football game. It’s such an effective presentation that when someone is attending a live game, you say, they’re subconsciously taking the on-field action they’re seeing and translating it into a televisual experience in their mind. It made me realize I’ve done this myself.

I’m really glad to hear you say that, because I will admit it is a completely impossible thing to prove. I can’t get inside people’s minds and say, “This is how you’re actually viewing football games.” I’ve thought about it a lot and I have what I think is a pretty strong theory explaining it. But again, it’s not exactly research you can do in a lab. This book really is closer to criticism of football the way books about criticism usually involve music or film or art. So there is some subjective projection.

Another idea from the book that I also found intensely relatable is the feeling that any random NFL game, even if it’s a Thursday night contest between two losing teams, is somehow a better television product than, say, the Oscars. I will make plans to watch Monday Night Football without knowing who’s playing. What I do know is I’m going to be consuming an NFL television product, and that’s enough. Is that how it is for you as well?

Oh, absolutely. Of course, you might have a little more psychological investment if the Bills are playing the Patriots for the AFC East title. But in many ways, I have the exact same experience watching the MAC on a Tuesday night where it’s Kent State playing Marshall. Because the thing is, when we talk about TV, if I were writing the New York Times TV column, I would spend a lot of time talking about the content of the program: Who are the characters? What is the theme? But in truth, what I think really gives people satisfaction is the form of television. A lot of times the way TV is formally constructed is a mystery because it becomes invisible when it’s done well. And the thing about football is it is formally brilliant as a television product. This was accidental. When they started playing football in the 19th century, football on television was an impossible thing to imagine. But the way it is created, the way we see it, the way the play stops after every down—all of these things that are even sometimes seen as a negative are actually subconsciously very satisfying.

When people are trying to criticize football, they often mention this Wall Street Journal story from 2010 where a group of researchers proved that in a three-hour NFL football game, there’s really only about 11 minutes of action. And this has been held up as evidence that we’re insane for liking football: How stupid is it to watch a three-hour production and see only 11 minutes of action? But as it turns out, 11 minutes is the perfect amount. We trick ourselves into thinking that what we want is nonstop simulation at the highest possible level, and yet that becomes deadening. There’s a hypnotic effect having these continual breaks that allow you to contextualize what you’re experiencing. And football, just by chance, does that perfectly.

You can watch the game while checking social media, drinking a beer, daydreaming. You once said watching football allows you to slip into an almost meditative state where you can think about your work, think about your writing. Is that part of the pleasure of watching football for you?

Absolutely, particularly in a big-picture way. I don’t really watch soccer, but let’s say, for some reason, I find myself in a situation where I’m going to watch the World Cup final. I’m with friends who are having a party and I haven’t really followed the tournament, but I’m watching this one limited experience. I want it to be as exciting as possible. I don’t want it to be meditative. I want it to be ultra engaging. I want to be on the edge of my seat for the entire match. But if I were to watch soccer several hours every weekend for years, that’s not how I would want it to be. I may think I do. It seems logical to say that. But actually what I want is an experience that’s made for this abstract perpetual relationship, and football has managed to do that. Certainly it wasn’t the intention of the NFL or college football or even the networks. It just happened that way.

Sticking on the television element, do you remember in 2013 there was that Super Bowl where there was a blackout midway through the game?

Yes, it was the Ravens and the Niners.

It threw into relief truly how much those games are a television product. It made me wonder if there were ever a blackout where the lights stayed on so the crowd in the stadium could continue to watch the game and it was safe for the players but the television cameras for whatever reason were unable to power up, would the game continue? It’s one of those “tree falls in the woods” questions. Can a football game go untelevised?

It’s a fascinating question. Let’s say this happens to a normal football game during the early window of games on a Sunday. For whatever reason, the cameras don’t work. Some cyber attack has made it impossible to transmit video. Well, if there were other games happening, they could be like, “We can still play this game without it being televised. We’ll just have to give people feeds from different games.” Or the people in the local area would get NFL RedZone for free that day. But if it were the Super Bowl, they would not play it. There’s no way. They would have to say, “The game won’t start till the cameras work.” And if they couldn’t fix it by that day, the game would be moved a week. I would be interested to see if there’s actually language built into the [broadcast] contract. What would be even more mind blowing would be if the game couldn’t be shown on TV, then you would have all these people in the stadium filming it on their phones, and the entire world would experience the Super Bowl through Twitter and Instagram. That’s a crazy thing to imagine, but at the same time, not so crazy.

There’s a portion of the book about Texas and its obsession with football. It made me think of that scene in Richard Linklater’s film Dazed and Confused, which is, of course, set in Austin, when Randall “Pink” Floyd ends up at a little league game and an old man walks up, grabs his bicep, and says, “Is this arm ready to throw about 2,000 yards this fall?” This guy knows how many upperclassmen are going to be on the team.

My wife actually wrote the oral history of Dazed and Confused.

I loved it. Great book.

And that’s a very good scene in that film because it feels very true to anybody who’s ever been in a small town where football was important. When I was growing up in my small town, if you would’ve gone into the local café during the fall, there would be old guys talking about the high school football team, and it was the same conversation through multiple generations where it was as if the parts were just being replaced, which they were—kids graduate and new kids replace them. And that is really the thing that I would argue is socially disappearing, and why when I say in some distant future, if football were to find itself in some catastrophic economic situation, there would not be this sense from the populace that this thing must be saved. That old guy from 1976 depicted in Dazed and Confused—there might be an old guy like that who still exists today, but will such an old guy exist in 50 years? I don’t think so.

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When the journalist Vic Garbarini asked Walter Becker and Donald Fagen to choose their favorite songs for his “60 Minutes” column in Guitar World, the Steely Dan duo gave him more than an hour’s worth of music. In addition to the dozen tracks they discussed for the March 2000 issue, they briefly mentioned 10 others, including proto power pop from the Byrds, a lushly orchestrated Bacharach and David joint performed by Dionne Warwick, and a Desmond Dekker chune that Becker described as “intergalactic reggae.” In this mixtape you’ll hear all of the glorious leftovers: mournful Motown balladry, searing Chicago blues, and an R&B confection Fagen called “pure sexiness.”

More ear candy…

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In the publishing industry at the turn of the 21st century, the guitar tablature for Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” was a cover-line-worthy selling point for a magazine whose newsstand sale price was $4.95. The shelves of Waldenbooks inside every bustling local mall brimmed with mags aimed at the aspirational shred-meister: Guitar, Guitar Player, Guitar One, Guitar World, Acoustic Guitar. The first Guitar Hero video game was a few years off on the horizon, and so learning to play “Eruption” on an actual six-string still seemed like one apex of human achievement, the teenage dirtbag’s version of summiting Everest.

It was in this milieu that the journalist Vic Garbarini was writing a regular column for Guitar World called “60 Minutes.” The concept was simple: get a high-profile musician to curate about an hour’s worth of their favorite music and offer commentary on each track. Over the years, he interviewed the likes of Lindsey Buckingham, Rick Nielsen, Geddy Lee, and Robert Pollard. In a 1996 issue, Joni Mitchell, ever the Steely Dan fan, praised “Deacon Blues” for, “The arrangement. The melody. The wit.”

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were promoting Two Against Nature, their Steely Dan comeback album, when Garbarini landed them for the March 2000 issue. “Walter and I were jazz fans from a very early age,” Fagen says. “We later discovered blues and rock as teenagers, so we’re attracted to rock and R&B that has kind of a jazz structure and swing to it.” The songs they selected reflect their range of influences: Brubeck and Mingus, Delta blues and Motown, the Beatles and Stones.

Garbarini tells me he’s planning to compile his “60 Minutes” columns into a book, an exciting proposition in part because precious few of the pieces are available online. In the meantime, please sit back and enjoy Becker and Fagen’s essential mix.

Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter to hear a mixtape showcasing Becker and Fagen’s “60 Minutes” spillover tracks.

You may also enjoy…

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1. A teen band needed a pianist. They called Donald Fagen.

The piano player for Roche Collins couldn’t make the gig. “So we figured our last option is Donald Fagen.”

It was really kind of a simple thing. I’ve been playing with Donald sometimes just for fun, and he, of course, has a good feel and can play chords. I had an idea for this groove kind of thing [for the song “Words to Live By”], and then I asked Donald for some help on it, and we just did it together.

2. Steely Dan’s surreal Today show concert, 25 years later

When Becker and Fagen met Couric and Roker

Looking back on the show again 25 years later, it makes me realize how much has changed. Walter is gone. [Pianist] Ted Baker is gone. Cornelius is gone. At that time, I was only 21. It felt like the world was full of promise and all these things could happen to me. I was with my girlfriend in New York City. 9/11 hadn’t happened yet, and I was watching my favorite band play on live TV. It does now feel like the end of something.

3. Becker and Fagen on the crisis and clarity of midlife

In interviews conducted in the early 1990s and published online for the first time, the Steely Dan duo open up about reemerging to tour and record as middle-aged men.

“My problem,” Becker tells Sharp, “was always the fact that I was not a great singer.” But once he reached middle age, Becker realized that if he wanted to finally make something of his own, he would have to figure out how to work within his limitations. Ultimately he would have to learn to use his voice.

“I decided that there was no point in being coy about it, and there’s something about when you get to be a certain age, you’re more willing to just let it hang out, so to speak.”

4. Becker and Fagen recreate the ‘60s jazz radio of their youth

Listen to the Steely Dan duo’s full, restored jazz-and-conversation program broadcast in 1988 on WBAI in New York.

The newfound bootleg includes, among other things, Becker and Fagen’s introduction to the program. “We’re going to tonight try to recreate the wonderful jazz shows that we used to listen to in the early ’60s, when we were growing up,” Fagen says, as the Gene Ammons tune “Woofin' and Tweetin'” plays in the background. “This kind of music and these kind of radio shows,” Becker adds, “had a very lasting effect on our musical consciousness.”

5. How AI is ruining (and reviving) Steely Dan

From Donald Fagen voice clones to the quixotic quest to finish “The Second Arrangement,” artificial intelligence now permeates the Daniverse.

In dim corners of the internet, I witnessed cutting-edge technologies applied in ways that I found variously fascinating and appalling. I saw AI used to generate images of characters from Steely Dan songs (text prompt: “Who is the Gaucho, amigo?”) and extend the album covers of Countdown to Ecstasy and The Royal Scam beyond the edges of their original frames. One morning I nearly spit out my coffee when a familiar ’70s-era photo of Becker and Fagen transformed into an unsettling AI-rendered video of the songwriters tenderly embracing. I have heard synthesized Fagen vocals on everything from “Deja Vu (Uptown Baby),” Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’s 1997 single that samples Steely Dan’s “Black Cow,” to the anti-drinking PSA “Alcohol” from McGruff’s Smart Kids Album, a Gaucho-esque 1986 cassette distributed by the Advertising Council. I have also gritted my teeth through songs generated by AIs that seem to have been trained on Steely Dan’s catalog. On Udio, a platform that spits out songs based on text prompts, a user named Mechadon made a raft of fake Dan tunes, including one apparently trolling those who feel uneasy about the creep of AI into the arts: “Who needs Donald anymore?” the Fagen clone sings. “You can make your own Steely Dan songs. That’s what your computer is for.”

6. Donald Fagen spins ‘70s favorites on Desert Island Discs

In a rare recording, the Nightfly plays castaway, selecting the songs he’d want to have with him if he were stranded.

Among the many treasures White so generously donated, I found a record with a striking yellow label that contained a recording of an appearance Donald Fagen made on Desert Island Discs in the early ’90s. Hosted by the late New York radio jock Tony Pigg, the show was apparently an Americanized spin on the long-running BBC Radio program of the same name.

7. The time Walter Becker prank-called Donald Fagen

While taking questions on the radio in 1993, the Nightfly fielded a hilarious call from “Frank from Swales, Arizona,” whose voice sounded oddly familiar.

“Now, Gary Katz,” Frank from Swales continues, “is he as tall as he looks in some of the pictures that I’ve seen?”

“Gary Katz is a homunculus,” Fagen says. “Do you know what that is, sir?”

“Uh, I think I do know what that is.”

“It’s a very tiny man.”

“I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say about Gary Katz,” says Frank from Swales.

8. Walter Becker on producing Rickie Lee Jones

In a radio interview from 1989, Becker discusses working on Jones’s album Flying Cowboys, the “essential creative spark” of a demo, and the benefits of digital studio technology.

It’s the producer’s function to provide whatever is needed to make that project happen, and I think in the case of Rickie Lee Jones, she had been writing for quite a while and she had multiple versions of some of her songs that were mutually exclusive, so we had to make some choices as to what material to use. Also, for the stuff we recorded from scratch, we had to decide on an approach—personnel and instrumentation and so on—and Rickie and I did that together, but basically she is the overall cohesiveness to her album, and it was my job to just make sure that got captured as well as possible.

9. Steely Dan’s rare Royal Scam radio appearance

Promoting their new album in 1976, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen spin records and take listeners’ questions on the London radio program Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It.

Caller: What would you say to the accusation that you’re the laziest band in the world?

Fagen: The laziest band in the world? You don’t know the work it takes! We put so much work into these albums. This takes a lot of think power, you know. We’re not just kidding around.

Becker: I’d like to say to whoever said that—

Caller: It wasn’t me.

Becker: It was someone in the English press, wasn’t it?

Caller: Yeah, I don’t know who it was either.

Becker: Well, we’re gonna find that person and—

Fagen: Have his legs broken! You know, we know some people in Chicago.

10. The golden age of Web 1.0 Steely Dan fandom

A scroll down memory lane with Jim “Hoops” McKay, majordomo of the Dandom Digest

And so between the mailing list and newsletter I was publishing along with this other forum, Walter started interacting with the fans under pseudonyms. It was sort of a fun thing: Is that Walter, or is that not Walter? It was kind of like friendly trolling in a certain way. It was a lot of fun. At some point people would discover that it had to be Walter, and then he’d disappear. Walter was especially engaged with technology. I’m sure Donald appreciated the internet, but it was more Walter’s bag.

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