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(Credits: Far Out / Rhino Entertainment)
Donald Fagen is one of the greatest musical minds that has ever graced the world of rock, and his standards are impeccably high as a result.
Firstly, his standards are high for himself. When he was writing with Steely Dan, he would always ensure that he and the band were doing as much as they could in order to get the most out of a studio session. He was always keen on layering different songs, picking out the best segments of music and ensuring they were the ones which made it to the public. Almost every Steely Dan song you hear has been carefully crafted and pined over.
Fagen was such a perfectionist that other musicians playing in the studio with him had to really push for a piece of music to make it on a record if it hadn’t gone through his strict process. The band’s guitarist, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, managed to nail the solo on ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ in one take, which was against the usual writing process.
“Yes, the solo on Rikki was one take, which was somewhat unusual for the way we approached the recording process,” said Baxter when discussing the record. “Becker and Fagen usually wanted to have me play the solos through a number of times, sometimes to capture specific ideas and sometimes to capture special performance moments.”
Fagen and his writing partner Walter Becker became so obsessed with the idea of making great music that they decided to stop playing their songs live, because the added pressure that came with taking a studio song to the stage put them off fully embracing their potential when writing. They were willing to push the boat out a lot more within their music as they were constantly trying to achieve a style and sound that didn’t exist elsewhere in the music industry.
Fagen’s discography speaks for itself when it comes to the high standards he had, but it is also represented in the fact that he only ever listened to music of the highest quality. He was always open to the idea of embracing new artists, but constantly found himself reverting back to the artists that had initially sparked his interest in music. When he was talking about the artists he loved, he said he only liked “seven or eight” but then could only name four (along with some arrangers).
“I basically listen to the same 40 albums that I listened to in high school, near Princeton,” said Fagen, “I had much better taste then. I was a kid jazz fan. I only like seven or eight of the greatest artists: Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk … And I like big-band arrangers, like Gil Evans. There’s a band called the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra that I used to like for the arrangements.”
While only having a small window of appreciation for some artists, there was also a lot of music that Fagen didn’t particularly have time for. While there isn’t a huge record of Fagen calling out artists that he didn’t like, he did criticise some certain styles of music. He criticised rock music and Steely Dan released the song ‘Only A Fool Would Say That’ as a jab at John Lennon and his track ‘Imagine’.
As the Steely Dan member himself admitted, “I have a critical nature, in the sense that when I look at something I often look for the flaws […] People are usually afraid to say what’s on their mind.”
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