The Cat is Back

After his Grammy-winning 1982 solo effort The Nightfly, Donald took a ten-year hiatus from performing. Then, in the early nineties he was back, jamming in New York clubs, rediscovering R&B and soul music and mounting a tour with The New York Rock and Soul Review, which led directly to a reunion of Steely Dan. His new solo record Morph The Cat comes 13 years after the release of his second solo album, the critically acclaimed Kamakiriad. Will the increasing convergence of styles and the global internet market mark a new era for acceptance of harmonically rich, forward-looking and well-produced pop-rock music? We sat with Donald Fagen on a recent afternoon in New York, eager to unravel this and some of his other complexities.

[Quoting the press release] “Morph the Cat is just your average soulful and sexy masterpiece about love, death, and homeland defense. . . .”

Oh, I didn’t say that. [Laughs.]

The Nightfly, Kamakiriad, and Morph the Cat: Is this a trilogy?

It didn’t start out that way, but when I was working on Kamakiriad, I realized it was a kind of a cliff-hanger. It ended with this guy driving his car into the unknown, so I should conclude it with a third [album], probably. And so when I had enough songs for the third one, Walter [Becker] and I took a break from touring and I figured it was a good time to do it.

A lot of fans expect that “Fagen” sound when they spin your albums; they expect you to be a certain way. Does that affect the way you write new music?

I never think of it for a second. I’m afraid I never think of the audience for one second. It’s the truth. I only try to entertain myself. I write what I want to hear, and I hope other people are also entertained by it.

I read a story that when you were a staff songwriter at ABC, you looked around one day and said, “I can’t write any songs for Three Dog Night or Dusty Springfield. My stuff is too hip.” Or maybe someone told you that. Were you trying to break new ground?

Well, I don’t remember ever saying that, but we tried to write pop songs and we just weren’t very good at it. They all sounded like they were stolen from some other radio song. There are guys there that I worked with who wrote a lot of pop songs that were quite good. But we just didn’t have the knack for it, and we’d always ruin them with something in the lyrics that would be too strange, or too outside. We just couldn’t think of anything that would go there and make sense that was normal sounding. Takes a real knack, and I think Gore Vidal once said, “S**t has its own integrity,” and, uh, we didn’t have that kind of integrity.

You were able to create your own market, though, and you outlasted everybody.

Yeah, we had a different kind of s**t. We had some kind of integrity.

On the new record, it sounds like you’re putting even more heart and soul within the slick Steely Dan-ish, Fagen-ish framework. Do you feel like this is less cynical than some of the Dan tracks?

Walter and I never try to be cynical. I think we’re realistic. This may be less subjective in the sense that, when Walter and I write together, there’s this kind of collective persona that becomes the narrator, which I impersonate, so there’s a little more. On my albums, it’s also a persona, but the narrator’s a little closer to myself.

With this album, it seems like you’re rediscovering an R&B or soulful side. There’s something new in this one that I didn’t hear in Kamakiriad.

That’s for other people to judge. I just try to play.

“The Great Pagoda of Funn” feels like a new “Deacon Blues,” the way the sections repeat, how the material comes back, the long outro.

The more I write, the more I try to go for some kind of development. Even if it’s just a more of a pop-type structure, I still like to get some kind of development in the structure or the solo or something to make it so you’re not just hearing a repeat.

Speaking of solos, how great is it to have long solos in tunes, especially trumpet solos?

Yeah, [trumpet player] Marvin Stamm did a great job.

You don’t solo though, right?

Actually, I do one solo.

Right, on the melodica.

Yeah, a little bit. One day I gotta do a record where I play more solos.

What I love about the solo sections — and you do this on “Aja” too — is when there’s new harmonic material under a new solo, so you’re not just blowing on the changes of the song.

Right. That’s maybe from listening to a lot of big band records where the arranger would do something different under the solos.

Has your array of keyboards changed for this record?

I’ve pretty much stuck to the same instruments all along. I like tunable keyboards, so I try to stay away from synthesizers, except for special effects. With some instruments, you get a good simulation with synthesizers, like mallets. But generally speaking, when you’re using a full keyboard, there are a lot of tuning problems on untunable instruments. Even if they have some kind of “stretch” program, I hear the harmonics on the top and the bottom: flat on top and sharp on the bottom. It bothers a lot of singers too.

You achieve a great feel with your players in the studio, and the groove is always well-defined and really present. Do you tell your players what to do?

I drug the rhythm section, and send them back to about 1956, and it’s a piece of cake. Some of the guys, like [guitarist] Jon Herington — he says he used to practice along with Steely Dan records, so he was ready [to record with me]. I didn’t have to tell them that much. I did have a chord rehearsal for the keyboards and guitars just so they could come in and not have to just see the chords for the first time. But aside from that it was pretty easy.

You’ve had a lot of great keyboard players — Victor Feldman, Paul Griffin, Michael McDonald — yet somehow they all end up sounding like you. Is it your writing, or your musical direction?

Sometimes my voicings are written out, and then I’ll play them my version of what they’re doing, or what I play. They don’t imitate me, but they amend what they’re doing to feel more like the way I play. I tend to play a little more laid-back than modern players. I listened to a lot of black players from the ’50s who especially have a more laid-back way of playing. That’s just the way I hear it, so that’s usually the main thing, just getting the guys to lay back a little more.

Do you write at the piano?

Most of the time, although there are times when I don’t, like I remember having to do a couple of horn arrangements on a train. I could do it in my head and then check it on the piano later.

Do song ideas flow from your piano style?

Yeah. I remember when I was at school, there was this macho thing about not using the piano to compose, and I never understood that very much. I didn’t see the point, really.

Do you demo tracks in your home studio?

I actually did some kind of really cheesy demos in [Apple] Garage Band, and that was about it.

Your arrangements don’t sound like they use many computer-based musical tools.

There was one where I used a sequence. I had everybody listen to a sequence of “Mary Shut the Garden Door,” and they had it in their phones, just as a guide. But on the others, we just played.

A lot of the intricate shuffles that [drummer] Keith Carlock plays; you didn’t want to come up with parts like that on a machine?

Yeah, exactly. I’d rather have Keith define the feel. He can define a groove that’s better than anything you can possibly get on a sequencer, and I just don’t have the patience to deal with one at this point.

So who’s the real recording geek? Is it Walter?

More than I am, for sure.

So you guys have been pioneers for 30 years now.

Well, we just try to get a good sound. Towards the end of the ’70s, it was kind of an accident, really, in that we were having trouble getting tracks, and so we asked [engineer] Roger Nichols if he could manufacture a drum track, and he did. Yeah, he ended up inventing the first full frequency sampler, The Wendel.

The Wendel gets a credit on one of your records, right?

Yeah, but really, it was out of desperation.

Please settle a long-standing question for me: What is the instrument that plays the long keyboard solo on “Do It Again”?

There was this instrument in the studio we were using. It was some kind of a Yamaha portable organ.

Were you thinking of Herbie Hancock at all when you did the solo?

No, I didn’t even know Herbie Hancock did that at the time. It just happened to be there; it was ’71, ’72, and it was a fairly recent model Yamaha organ of some kind.

To what do you attribute to the staying power of Steely Dan?

I’d like to say that we’re honest in the way that we approach it. We address real life things like aging, and social problems and political things and there’s humor in it, and so on. You know, I saw the Rolling Stones the other day, and they’re still essentially posing as adolescents and they’re in their sixties, and they’re still around, so it’s hard to say.