Steely Dan

Steely Dan: Pretzel Logic

Review by Bud Scoppa, Rolling Stone, May 1974

STEELY DAN is the most improbable hit-singles band to emerge in ages. On its three albums, the group has developed an impressionistic approach to rock ...

Steely Dan: Wembley Arena, London

Live Review by Chris Ingham, MOJO, November 1996

THEY QUIT TOURING IN '74; broke up in '80. Now the arch hipster auteurs of literate, cynical, smart-ass rock jazz – the creators of some ...

AUDIO: Steely Dan (2003)

Interview by Gavin Martin, Rock's Backpages Audio, June 2003

Messrs. Fagen and Becker talk about their Everything Must Go album, William Burroughs, their time away from each other, songwriting, and a whole lot more.

File format: mp3; file size: 41mb; Interview length: 44 52"; sound quality: ****

Steely Dan: Can't Buy A Thrill (Probe SPB 1062, £2.25)

Review by Andrew Tyler, Disc and Music Echo, January 1973

THIS ONE'S already speeding up the Billboard and Cashbox charts – currently around the 30 mark and likely to jump about 20 places by next ...

Steely Dan: Get Your Thrills Here

Interview by Penny Valentine, Sounds, March 1973

THE MOST exciting new band to break from the States this year is Steely Dan. ...

Counting Down to Headline Status: Steely Dan

Interview by Steven Rosen, LA Free Press, August 1973

ON SEPT. 2, Steely Dan perform their first concert as headliners, that status which lifts the working-class band from the ranks of the bourgeois and ...

Pipeline

Column by Mark Shipper, Phonograph Record, September 1973

"GREAT ALBUMS are hard to find these days," I once wrote in my definitive book on the subject, Great Albums Are Hard To Find These ...

Steely Dan: Countdown To Ecstasy

Review by Steven X Rea, Music World, November 1973

THIS IS BASICALLY just a review of one song on Countdown To Ecstasy. I mean, the rest of the record is fine, the lyrics are ...

Steely Dan: Countdown To Ecstasy (MCA)

Review by Mick Gold, Let It Rock, December 1973

STEELY DAN IS a vehicle for the songwriting talents of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who entered the music world via a two-year gig with ...

Steely Dan: Pretzel Logic

Review by Ian MacDonald, NME, 1974

A FINE RECORD. And that sentence goes first because the fact that a band as perfectly poised as Steely Dan can reach their third album ...

Steely Dan: Walking Slow, Drinking Alone, And Moving Swiftly Through The Night…

Profile and Interview by Wayne Robins, NME, February 1974

WERE SITTING drinking Campari in the Angry Squire in Seventh Avenue on a dull sweltry Sunday night, watching the sippers and swallowers drift through a ...

Steely Dan: Steely Logic

Interview by Chris Charlesworth, Melody Maker, April 1974

ALTHOUGH IT'S quite incidental to the story that follows, let's begin by explaining the meaning of the term Steely Dan. It has nothing to do ...

Steely Dan: Get Dan And Get With It!

Live Review by Chris Welch, Melody Maker, May 1974

Steely Dan: Palace Theatre, Manchester ...

Steely Dan

Profile and Interview by Chris Welch, Melody Maker, June 1974

STEELY DAN, in their short time together, have been hailed as one of the best bands to emerge from America in a long time. They ...

Showbiz Kids: Talking with Jeff Baxter, and a Critical View of Steely Dan

Interview by Chris Briggs, ZigZag, July 1974

Interviewing an American musician is a unique experience. The inevitable myth preceeds actuality. Three Steely Dan albums and eighteen months of impressions formed within the ...

Steely Dan: Katy Lied

Review by Nick Kent, NME, April 1975

THIS ALBUM worries me.It worries me because so much of the music here is so blatantly lacklustre compared with the exhiliratingly high standards already set ...

Steely Dan: Katy Lied

Review and Interview by Steven Rosen, Circus Raves, May 1975

EIGHT-THIRTY PM. On the sixteenth story of a monster New York skyscraper a lonely light shone at the end of a cavernous floor. The deserted ...

Steely Dan: Katy Lied

Review by John Mendelsohn, Rolling Stone, May 1975

STEELY DAN sound like a million dollars not only next to at least 26 of their coresidents of the Boss 30 when they're in it, ...

Steely Dan: Katy Lied

Review by Jonh Ingham, Let It Rock, June 1975

WHEN I FIRST RECEIVED this album it engendered dispassionate dislike, but the more I play it the more I become merely ambivalent. Certainly there are ...

Steely Dan: Katy Lied

Review by Wayne Robins, Creem, July 1975

Slouching Toward Number One ...

Skunk Hunting In W1

Interview by Chris Salewicz, NME, July 1975

THERE'S A delicately detailed brass rubbing of Burlington House above the bed-head in room 420 at the Inn On The Park. Some rock musicians would've ...

Steely Dan: The Royal Scam

Review by Max Bell, NME, May 1976

DEFINITION: SCAM – THE scenario for a confidence trick. The lowdown on same. The stage preparatory to the heist or sting. ...

Steely Dan: Don and Walt

Interview by Richard Cromelin, Sounds, June 1976

  I have never met NapoleonBut I plan to find the time...Cause he looks so fine upon that hillThey tell me he was lonely, he's lonely ...

Steely Dan: The Royal Scam

Review by Bud Scoppa, Circus, August 1976

DONALD FAGEN AND Walter Becker don't play by the rules. They won't tour, they won't talk to interviewers, they won't keep a band together — ...

Steely Dan: Excerpts from a Teenage Opera

Interview by Richard Cromelin, Phonograph Record, June 1977

EVEN IN THE DAYS when Steely Dan was a finite rock band of relatively normal constitution, leaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen insisted that it ...

Steely Dan

Retrospective by Max Bell, NME, August 1977

While the poor people sleep-in with the shade on the light While the poor people sleepin' all the stars come out at night – 'Show ...

Steely Dan

Interview by Sylvie Simmons, Sounds, October 1977

IT'S NOT every day that Steely Dan bare their souls to the public. But amid the palm trees and coke bottles at the Bel Air ...

Steely Dan Movie

Report and Interview by Harvey Kubernik, Melody Maker, January 1978

Steely Dan will compose and perform the title track for FM, which is scheduled to begin filming this week at Universal Studios. Danny Rosencrantz, vice-president ...

Steely Dan: Gaucho

Review by Andy Gill, NME, November 1980

THE COVER to this, the seventh Steely Dan album (discounting the Greatest Hits compilation), features a painting or anaglyph of a dancing couple of presumably ...

Steely Dan: Gaucho

Review by Mitchell Cohen, Creem, March 1981

SHE STOMPED into the living room, as much as one can stomp in pink slippers and an extra-large Close Encounters t-shirt, and conspicuously clicked the ...

Steely Dan: A Dan for all Seasons

Discography by Fred Dellar, Vox, December 1990

One more glance through the rock files to evaluate the deeds and doings of Steely Dan. Flicking the pages – Fred Dellar ...

Donald Fagen: Return of the Nightfly

Interview by Richard Cromelin, Los Angeles Times, November 1991

Steely Dan co-creator Donald Fagen resurfaces after nearly a decade of silence, with new works and a new outlook on life. ...

Donald Fagen: Dan Dare

Interview by Nick Coleman, Time Out, May 1993

Back in the '70s, Steely Dan grabbed the American Dream by the throat with their deceptively soft rock. Now singer Donald Fagen is back, giving ...

Donald Fagen: Back To Bed For Another 11 Years Then

Interview by Andy Gill, Q, June 1993

VARIOUSLY JET-LAGGED and eyeing each other guardedly from behind their paper plates and coffee cups, half a dozen representatives of the world's rock press settle ...

Donald Fagen: The Man Who Came In From The Cool

Profile and Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Arena, Spring 1993

Steely Dan were the muso's band. As icily astute chroniclers of the Seventies, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker recorded a series of virtuoso albums of ...

Steely Dan: Remastered - The Best Of Steely Dan (MCA)

Review by Nick Hornby, MOJO, January 1994

"Who was The Razor Boy? What is The Boston Rag? Where is Mizar-5?" ...

Walter Becker: Hasn't He Grown

Interview by Andy Gill, Q, April 1995

WHAT'S WRONG with this picture? Halfway up a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, Walter Becker, one-half of Steely Dan, the most cynical rock'n'roll ...

Steely Dan: The Return Of Steely Dan

Profile and Interview by Andy Gill, MOJO, October 1995

ONCE UPON A TIME, they were the odd couple in rock. They wrote songs that featured knuckle-knotting chords and brain-twisting lyrics. They welded jazz and ...

Steely Dan: Librarians on Acid

Profile and Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Guardian, The, January 2000

STEELY DAN have always split people down the middle. On one side sit major dudes like William Gibson, who delight in the apparent disjunction between ...

Steely Dan: The Second Coming

Retrospective and Interview by Paul Zollo, Performing Songwriter, The, January 2000

IN MANHATTAN, a couple weeks before the final Christmas of the 20th Century. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have arrived together at the 12th floor, ...

Steely Dan Continues the Battle

Interview by Paul Zollo, cdnow.com, January 2000

THEY ARE THE core of Steely Dan – Walter Becker and Donald Fagen – the two friends who long ago disbanded the original lineup of ...

Steely Dan: Joined At The Hip

Review and Interview by Chris Ingham, MOJO, January 2000

IT'S BEEN 20 YEARS, A HIATUS ALMOST unheard of in rock. In the 1970s. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen – studio auteurs infused with the ...

Steely Dan: Countdown To Ecstasy

Review and Interview by Andy Gill, Independent, The, February 2000

When Steely Dan vocalist Donald Fagen released his second solo album, Kamakiriad, in 1993, fans marvelled at the inordinate length of time it had taken ...

Steely Dan: Two Against Nature

Review by Ian MacDonald, Uncut, March 2000

First album in two decades from America's premier cerebral jazz-pop twosome ...

Steely Dan and Jazz

Interview by Chris Ingham, Jazzwise, December 2000

WAITING FOR Walter Becker and Donald Fagen AKA Steely Dan in their publicist’s New York office, I spot two mouth-wateringly opulent 24 CD sets of ...

Steely Dan: Two Against Nature

Review by Ed Doheny, Rock's Backpages, December 2000

TWO AGAINST NATURE could have been horrible, as so many of these returns by grizzled ’70s vets are; as it was, the album was merely ...

Steely Dan: Decadent Diversions

Retrospective by Ian MacDonald, Uncut, March 2002

IAN MacDONALD ON STEELY DAN'S DARK HORSE, GAUCHO ...

Steely Dan: Hey 19: It's About Time

Profile and Interview by Wayne Robins, Los Angeles Times, March 2002

"WHAT RECORD COMPANY are we on, by the way?" Donald Fagen wants to know. "I'm not kidding." ...

The Backpages Interview: Steely Dan

Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages, June 2003

This week sees the release of Everything Must Go, the follow-up to Steely Dan's Grammy-grabbing Two Against Nature. BARNEY HOSKYNS discusses war, economics and online ...

Curbing Their Enthusiasm: Steely Dan

Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Uncut, June 2003

THIS IS TOO, TOO PERFECT: Steely Dan strolling into a sleek hotel suite in Santa Monica, the Pacific Ocean sparkling through the window behind them. ...

Steely Dan: A Droll Double Act

Interview by Gavin Martin, Independent, The, June 2003

IT IS LATE AFTERNOON before Walter Becker and Don Fagen greet their first interviewer of the day. The two men, who first fronted a band ...

10 Questions for Steely Dan

Interview by Dave DiMartino, MOJO, September 2003

Dave Di Martino talks to the venerable jazz-pop double act about sexual aids, Charlotte Rampling and perfectionism. Well, why not? ...

Vinyl Icon: Gaucho

Retrospective and Interview by Johnny Black, Hi-Fi News & Record Review, July 2010

GAUCHO, THE FINAL ALBUM Steely Dan recorded before they broke up in 1981, is still regarded as a masterpiece by aficionados, but making it put ...

Any Major Dude Will Tell You: The Funked-Up Muzak and Cerebral Genius of Steely Dan

Retrospective by Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages, September 2012

NOTE: This is an updated version of a piece written for the short-lived biannual Faber/Domino publication Loops. I've revived it to commemorate the 40th anniversary ...