Donald Fagen has made a career out
of sending listeners to the dictionary. As half of the band Steely Dan, he
helped bury sardonic stories and sneaky allusions under glassy jazz melodies,
such as name-checking Cuervo Gold and “fine
Colombian” (ahem) in the hit “Hey Nineteen.” On his first solo record, “The Nightfly,” he used the Cold War as a backdrop for hot
romance; on his latest, “Morph the Cat,” he asks us to imagine, among other
things, a “Rabelaisian puff of smoke” descending on
“I was mostly influenced by writers and poets,” says Mr. Fagen. He and his partner in Steely Dan, Walter Becker,
shared a love of satirists like Philip
Roth and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as black-humored
genre artists like Frederic Brown and Philip K. Dick.
When judging a lyric, Mr. Fagen
has a simple standard: Look at the “way a point is made with words.” For
instance, Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” with its famous refrain: “C’est la vie, say the old folks/It goes to show you never
can tell.” The lyrics are simply “musical sounding,” Mr. Fagen
says. They tell “a
story in a meaningful way.”
Below are Mr. Fagen’s picks for five rock records with top-notch wordplay.
The Chess Box
Chuck Berry (1988)
“The idea of intelligent rock and roll probably starts with
Chuck Berry,” Mr. Fagen says. The pioneering
guitarist’s lyrics are “consistently interesting and
funny, and well formed-they sing really well.” While he admits that Mr. Berry’s
songs may not all be “musically marvelous,” Mr. Fagen
says he’s “never been able to find a bad line” there. (Since Mr.
Bringing It All Back Home
Bob Dylan (1965)
This record was “nuclear,” Mr. Fagen says. After four exclusively acoustic albums, Mr. Dylan went electric on side one of “Bringing It All Back Home”--and, just as daring, he “started to expand the subject matter you could write a song about.” His lyrics became much more aggressively personal--if not downright impenetrable--on stream-of-consciousness classics like “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
Absolutely Free
Frank Zappa (1967)
Mr. Fagen credits Mr. Zappa, the prodigious songwriter, band leader and curmudgeon,
with “updating the tradition of musical satire” for the rock-and-roll era. When
Mr. Zappa came along, “people took rock and roll very
seriously,” Mr. Fagen says. “There wasn’t that much
humor in rock music at all.” The psychedelic slapstick of “Absolutely Free”
helped change all that, with its extended riff on
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Joni Mitchell (1975)
“Very poetic,” Mr. Fagen says of this jazzy masterwork. Ms. Mitchell, who penned iconic tunes such as “Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” was “fearless” in her subject matter, Mr. Fagen adds. Many singer-songwriters had tackled tropes like heartache and loss, but Ms. Mitchell was among the first to present those stories from a woman’s point of view.
The Future
Leonard Cohen (1992)
Mr. Fagen wasn’t thrilled with Mr. Cohen during his 1960s heyday, when he was writing folk standards like “Suzanne.” (Mr. Fagen recalls thinking the tune was “precious and silly.”) But Mr. Cohen “developed a lot,” Mr. Fagen says. Case in point: “The Future,” a “brutal but honest” take on society and the human condition. (What about rap, a pitiless--and wordy--genre if there ever was one? Mr. Fagen likes some of it as poetry, but “musically it bores me,” he says. “I’d just as soon hear somebody read [poetry] without anything in the background.”)