ARTISTS ALWAYS have this sort of arrogant belief that people will be interested in their music. And sure, you hope for that, but we had no idea what to expect. It was easy to imagine that we d be completely irrelevant to people now.
Walter Becker the shorter, blonder, non-singing half of Steely Dan is holding forth on the subject of his band s return to the spotlight after a huge hiatus of self-imposed inactivity. He sounds like he can t quite believe that the East Coast jazz-rockers still have an audience to come back to after 20 years out of circulation.
We talked about this a number of times. When you spend years working on an album like we did, it s essentially an act of faith, no matter what happened last time out.
What did happen last time out was that the band broke up unsatisfactorily, in a welter of drugs, lawsuits and oversized recording budgets. Following 1980 s Gaucho the greatest album with a title track about a gay couple ever made the pair parted company on cautiously non-hostile (David Fagen s phrase) terms.
Becker had been injured in a road accident that year, and had been sued by the parent of a dead friend for introducing her to drugs. He descended into coke addiction, only resurfacing years later to produce Liverpudlian popsters China Crisis. As for Fagen, his superb, jazz-tinged debut solo album The Nightfly appeared in 1982, after which he wrote a very shortlived column for the film magazine Empire. And, until the early 1990s, that was the last anyone saw of Steely Dan.
In 1993, an older, greyer Fagen reappeared touting a new solo album (Kamakiriad), which had been produced by Becker. The positive reviews it received encouraged both men to go back on the road, assembling a band to play a mixture of old Dan material and some tracks from Fagen s records.
Long American and European tours followed, producing a patchy live album (Alive In America), before the decision was taken to record their first new material in two decades. The duo may look like The Chemical Brothers in their old press photos and like stockbrokers in their new ones, but from the opening bassline of Gaslighting Abbie to the closing bars of West Of Hollywood , Two Against Nature is unmistakably one of the finest albums of Steely Dan s career.
We were near death by the end, but you gotta find a goal and go through with it, avers Fagen, whose New York drawl resembles a deeper version of his famously nasal singing voice. Otherwise, why bother?
Becker: What was difficult for us was that, for a variety of reasons getting the album out, putting a band together, etc we put ourselves in a position of working continuously, from start to finish each day. With previous albums we ve usually had breaks, but this one was much more of a long march.
We started writing it in 1997, explains Fagen, although we had some stuff left over from the 1980s. We have a file of material on cassette, and fragments of lyrics that go back quite a way. These songs were mostly written in the last couple of years, but there were pieces of music that go back 20 years or so.
Though their sales figures have always been impressive, does it irk them that many people seem to subconsciously lump them in with soporific Seventies soft-rockers like The Doobie Brothers and The Eagles? One doubts, for instance, whether the average person in the street could name any Steely Dan song other than Rikki Don t Lose That Number or the ubiquitous Reeling In The Years .
I actually like Reeling In The Years , Fagen retorts. I thought it was a good record! I ll stand by that one. No, we had a couple of hits in the early 1970s, and since then it s always been a struggle. We don t really make singles anyway. We just write songs and collect them on albums. So it doesn t matter to us.
It s clear from the utterances of both men that the airing of seven or eight old songs on the upcoming live shows will be the closest this gets to a nostalgia trip.
We don t look at what we do as nostalgia, states Becker firmly. A substantial part of our motivation for doing this record was to play live with a band. Of course, a lot of people who come to see our shows just want to hark back to the time they first heard the old songs. And that s fine. But we don t look at it that way.
Curiously, both seem more eager to talk about their periods of indolence during the Eighties than about their glory days of the previous decade, with Fagen admitting that he grew so lethargic at one point, the sales of Steely Dan reissues on CD were his main source of income.
You won t find anyone who applauded the introduction of CDs louder than me, he says. Those sales definitely kept us afloat during a real fallow period. Cause in the 80s we didn t do much. I did my solo album and Walter did a few small-scale projects.
On a related note, would it be fair to say that there are two types of Steely Dan aficionados those who enjoy the more raucous, woolly-headed rock-outs of earlier albums like Countdown To Ecstasy, and those who prefer the glossy, polished textures of everything they did (sorry!) from Aja onwards?
I think that s a fair comment, Becker concurs, except for the fact that there are probably people who like both strands of it, and who see the continuity at work, even though the musical style may have evolved along the way.
And also, there s an elusive quality of pop music that you can achieve when you re young, concludes Fagen. You may not be as clever or as professional, but there is a quality that it s very difficult to get unless you re young. That s a simple fact of life, y know? So you have to start evolving in some other way, because if you re making the same record you made when you were 21, then you re . . . in bad shape.
Two Against Nature is out now on Giant.