Bill DeMain interview

TITLE: 5 Minutes with Steely Dan
INTERVIEWER: Bill DeMain
SOURCE: Performing Musician magazine
DATE: July/August 2003

To interview Donald Fagen and Walter Becker is to accept that at least a third of the answers you'll get will be delivered with a kind of shtick. Non sequiturs, arcane references,wry observations--since they met in the late 1960s at Bard College in New York City, the two friends have been volleying these back and forth with the timing and practiced nonchalance of Bob & Ray.

The affectionate give-and-take is also part of what has made them one of the most unique songwriting teams in pop history. Drawing from jazz, hipster movie soundtracks, Brill Building pop, rock & roll, and the blues (Fagen says that their approach is often about "subverting the blues"), they trade ideas, building up compositions that are both harmonically complex and catchy--a delicate balance mastered by very few. Any danger of preciousness in the music is tempered by a wicked sense of humor in their lyrics. Eschewing the typical you-and-I love scenarios, they create worlds in their songs, alive with colorful characters and telling details (consider the delicious opening lines of Hey Nineteen: "Way back when in 67, I was the dandy of Gamma Chi"). Drop the needle (or laser beam) down anywhere in their recorded works--Bad Sneakers, Any Major Dude Will Tell You, Kid Charlemagne, Peg, Babylon Sisters, Cousin Dupree--and you're instantly transported to a place that could only be Planet Steely Dan.

This holds true on their latest CD, Everything Must Go, the follow-up to 2000's Grammy-winning return Two Against Nature. From the anime-flavored Pixeleen to the humorous Godwhacker (a song about exactly what the title implies) to the film-noirish Green Book, this is Steely Dan still at the height of their creative powers, making grown-up pop music that is fresh and original.

I met Donald Fagen and Walter Becker at a swank hotel in Santa Monica. As the afternoon sunshine filtered through the curtains, the pair lounged on opposite ends of a couch, fielding my questions with equal parts thoughtfulness and irreverence.

BILL: Donald, you've said that you feel like most artists only have a few years when they're at their most inspired. Then it becomes a matter of maintaining some kind of standard. As songwriters, I think you guys are still doing work equal to your best stuff. How do you fight against that inevitable slide that seems to affect to many artists?

DONALD: You don't put out material just to put out material. If you have someyears where you don't have anything percolating, then it's best not to put anything out. You have to sort of stand by that. Even if you're broke.

WALTER: Although in my experience, the years that you're broke are the yers that you do put something out. The other thing is: we don't write songs for other people, for the most part. Donald has had a few tunes done here and there. But sort of our entire output pretty much goes into the Steely Dan records and the solo records that we've done. And we throw away a lot of stuff. We have a lot of songs that we've deleted. I thhink that other people who are producing more probably include more of those things that we have the luxury of not including because we make as few records as we do.

DONALD: I think when we weren't together or weren't writing, we took other kinds of jobs. I was working on various things. Writing for movie scores. And Walter was producing jazz records. You have to find something to do during the daylight hours. I think your unconscious is working anyway and you just have to wait. As Walter says: sometimes when you get really desperate, your mind will get working. Desperation is a great motivator.

BILL: Also, maybe just having a songwriting partner helps to challenge you to do your best work. Keeps you honest.

DONALD: I think you're right about that.

WALTER: It also keeps you productive, in a way. Whereas you could sit by yourself and be stumped or blocked or you could go off on a lengthy self-indulgent tangent of some sort in a way that is your personal thing--if you're doing it with a partner, you're less likely to get off on those tangents. And you're less likely to keep going back and sitting there day after day if you're not producing anything. If nothing's happening, you stop doing it. I think also, with a partner, it makes it more amusing. You're not just confronting problems. On the days that you have where you don't get a lot done, you do something else. You have a few laughs. You go for a walk. Or otherwise console yourselves one way or another.

DONALD: Or write little screeds for the website.

WALTER: That's right. Nurse our petty grudges against various members of the human race.

DONALD: Also, there's always someone there to say: "You know--that idea is psychotic. Let's go on to the next one, okay?"

WALTER: "That's not a chorus. That's a cry for help."

BILL: Have your roles in the co-writing relationship changed over the years?

DONALD: I think when we first started writing in college, maybe Walter was initiating more music. I think now it's sort of like, there's usually some kind of kernel that's developed before we start. The input on lyrics seems to be about the same as it always was.

BILL: I noticed that when you were on Piano Jazz recently, you covered Mood Indigo and Star Eyes. I assume that as listeners, you're drawn to those kind of classic sentimental love-songs. Have you ever tried to write that way?

DONALD: I don't know if I'm drawn to sentimental love-songs. I think the literature of jazz has always been the standards of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Most of which have romantic lyrics. I think we're drawn to those mostly because they are the bones of what you improvise on when you're studying jazz.

WALTER: By and large, the lyrics of those songs are the least interesting and ultimately the most limiting aspects of them as songs. I think for example, one of the things that's hard for me listening to most any jazz song is: "Now we've got to sing Body and Soul or I Can't Get Started." I don't want to make another journey thru that lyric. I've heard it so many times. And it's only so good to begin with, in many cases. And it was stylized to the traditions of the day.

There are some spectacular exceptions, of course. But I think some qualified people, as a group, should untertake the job of getting permission, then rewriting the lyrics of the standard songs. So that some new jazz singer can sing [i]Stella by Starlight[/i] with another set of lyrics. In my opinion, you're not tired of hearing the music. But you are sort of tired of the lyrics in many cases. So I propose that as an endeavor. It wouldn't take much. I think other composers would soon start to follow in our footsteps, don't you?

DONALD: I think it's part of the impulse of singers like Jon Hendricks. And people who improvise and scatted over the choruses to songs. And wrote lyrics to fit the scat ideas. That's part of what Charlie Parker did too. Writing melodies over chords. It's boring to play the same melodies. So one of the functions of jazz is a kind of rescue operation to keep these songs interesting and fresh.

WALTER: Operation Jazz Rescue.

BILL: Steely Dan songs are always harmonically rich. If a songwriter wanted to liven up their chord progressions, what would you suggest?

DONALD: Look to another genre and start your search there.

WALTER: Realizing that chords may have more than 2 or 3 notes in them would be one way. Another way would be to use chords with 2 or 3 notes--but don't use the right bass notes.

DONALD: Read Schoenberg's harmony book. It's very enlightening.

WALTER: Joni Mitchell developed quite an elaborate system of playing triads with different bass notes to achieve a certain effect.

DONALD: We used to be big fans of Laura Nyro. And she would substitute bass notes in a great way. She had a way of combining soul music with more interesting chords. You'd also hear it in Motown records. It's funny. Because with classical harmony, they'd already gone thru this. With Stravinsky and Bartok and Hindemith. But pop music started doing it a little bit later.

WALTER: One of the problems with more sophisticated harmony is that it has a lot of unwelcome baggage for pop music in many cases. So you want to avoid the associations that people have with major-7th chords and diminished chords with other kinds of music that tend to make the thing not sound like pop music or not sound tough or whatever. One of the things that we've worked a lot on is trying to get that richness without getting all of the negative sonic connotations that people seem to have in connection to that stuff. That's why I think Joni Mitchell or Laura Nyro, instead of playing a C-major-7th chord, they wold play a G triad over C. Eliminating the E. And you get some of the lyrical feeling of a major-7th chord. But not so much of the sentimental feeling.

DONALD: If you take the third out, it's not as saccharine. It's more austere-sounding. And yet has the major 7th. When you hear Laura Nyro's music, you wouldn't think lounge. Although of course now, lounge players do that too.

BILL: You once said that a successful song is one that would make you laugh when you listen back to it. Is that still true?

WALTER: I don't feel it's necessary that other people's songs make me laugh. Although I like it when they do. In the right way. But I definitely like it when our songs have a humorous component to them.

DONALD: Sometimes with music that is really great, I don't think there's anything particularly funny about it. But my response will be to laugh at it. Even something like Stravinsky. I don't know exactly why. Something about seeing the way a great artist controls all the elements in a certain way and causes something to happen. It somehow causes a laughter response.

WALTER: It's a complicated thing in general about why people laugh.

DONALD: I'll laugh at the sad parts of Fellini movies.

WALTER: Part of that has to do with the idea that you're not entirely engulfed in the reality of the work of art. You're also looking at it simultaneously from a slight remove. And you're thinking about the artist making that work of art. And when you see him pull off an incredible trick--even if the essence of the trick is to produce a powerful sad emotion or something like that--you're amused and delighted that he did it.

DONALD: You want to give the artist a right-on handshake.

BILL: If you were going to teach a class on songwriting, what would you tell your students?

WALTER: A writer writes.

DONALD: Never buy a hat thru the mail.

WALTER: I would advise them--borrowing from John Gardner--to avoid "the frigidity of Longinus". [Cassius Longinus, c.213-272, a Greek rhetorician and philosopher.]

DONALD: The frigidity of Longinus? You mean when your watch has stopped?

WALTER: John Gardner describes frigidity as failing to sympathize with your characters, in a way. Being false to your characters in a way that your reader understands.

DONALD: Don't ever get involved with technique to the point where it becomes too important. It's the least important thing to have. Some people think it's the most important. At least, conventional technique. Make up your own technique.

BILL: Is there a question you've always wanted to be asked in an interview that you've never been asked?

WALTER: "You want to try some of this Persian heroin?" I don't think anyone's ever asked us that.