Steely Dan - Demos

Steely Dan Demos 0:00 Bad Sneakers 3:10 Black Friday #1 6:39 Black Friday #2 9:36 Everyone's Gone To The Movies 13:44 Black Cow #1 17:48 Black Cow #2 22:17 I Got The News 25:05 Gaucho 29:57 My Rival 34:05 Glamour Profession 41:54 The Second Arrangement #1 46:54 The Second Arrangement #2 DONALD FAGEN & WALTER BECKER interviewed by David Breskin for MUSICIAN magazine Mar. 1981 (RIP). Edited by Flip. Q: As your vocabulary grows, musically and lyrically, and you become more aware of your artistic options. do you find it more difficult to finish a song? B: It got tough a while ago. Yes, the last verse is hard to write. The more you know, the more you might paint yourself into a corner. F: But the way we write – it’s more improvisational and instinctual. We don’t really use “strategies” consciously. B: But we do in a way. F: The method derives from the subject. B: But nevertheless there it is, the method. By the time you’ve finished everything except that last piece or link of a song, you’ve got to make some very, very conscious choices. F: All right, we’ve learned certain things in terms of how to present the material. We know now what a bridge is sup- posed to do: it opens up the song musically, and we tend to open it up lyrically as well, in that it tends to talk about subject more generally than the verses do. B: And it’s also a real release from the tension of the lyrics in the verses. You’re suspended in time for awhile. F: You generally find that there’s much more detail in the verses than in the choruses. B: When you’re in the bridge you don’t have to worry about how you got to this point, however fucked up that may be, or, how did I get to this swell position I’m in now. So it’s a release, a channel. Somebody invented the form, God knows when. I know they didn’t have bridges in Gregorian chants but they’ve had them for a while. Q: The Brooklyn Bridge has been around for a very long time… B: Right, there you go, and you know how good you feel when you’re on that because you’re not yet in Brooklyn but you’ve left Manhattan. F: (Wryly) The traditional popular song form of the ‘30s and ‘40s has served us well. B: Oh yes, through the eighties, through the eighties. F: I like it, it’s a good thing. It’s the closest thing we have to a structure for rock’n’roll. It’s blues, and traditional song form. Q: I know you agonize over your lyrics. Does it ever frustrate you that most of the people listening…all they want is a beat and a hummable melody? B: I assume that’s the case with most of the audience, or at least a big part of it, and that’s why we try to always make the lyrics not grab your attention. We want them to sound good with the music, even if you’re not an English-speaking person. Q: …but you don’t want the lyrics to be a one-shot deal, like a comedy record…. B: That’s definitely a problem. We have to clever, but not funny. F: We have a problem, trying not to cross the comedy threshold. B: Every time someone’s in the next room when we’re writing a song they’ll say, “Don’t tell me you’re fucking writing songs in there, you’re not working, ‘cause you’re screaming and laughing in there. You’re not writing songs, you’re making up Pope jokes. Q: Do you feel you’ve grown as artists? F: It’s a matter of maturing. Becoming more selective with material, knowing what to write about, being able to pick and choose – showing more discretion than in the earlier days. Musically, our harmonic vocabulary and so on has expanded a great deal…so I feel we’ve progressed a lot. DONALD FAGEN & WALTER BECKER interviewed by David Breskin for MUSICIAN magazine Mar. 1981 (RIP)