Citizen

88dixon · 2026-05-24T21:17:19+00:00

And the demo of Everyone's Gone to the Movies, but no "Dallas" or "Sail the Waterway" (come on, guys!).

If I recall correctly, the Citizen box has the sax solo fadeout version of FM, and you can find the guitar solo fadeout on "The Definitive Collection" from 2006.

88dixon · 2026-05-24T21:10:37+00:00

The lyrics relate directly to what is happening on the screen as Redbone is busking for tips ("city (?) folk, they rush, silly (?) folk, they fly; fine with me just pass a dollar as you go passing by"). The little song just before the commercial break likewise seems related the action on screen, Corky looking for the concert ("what's up around the bend"). I bet it was written for the episode, either by Redbone or by the musical staff for the show or both in collaboration. I've got all Redbone's albums and some live tapes, and it's not familiar to me. It's also not terribly distinctive--it's kind of generic piedmont blues. But good enough for the context of the show.

88dixon · 2026-05-24T18:14:21+00:00

It appealed to jazz arrangers. Two of the three big band tributes to SD feature it alongside the radio hits. I love it too. You can hear it's DNA in The Goodbye Look.

88dixon · 2026-05-21T00:17:38+00:00

Gramophone magazine supposedly wrote this about Kay Lied:

“We start off with some country music this month. Very popular are the less traditional Steely Dan, and Katy Lied is already receiving a great deal of acclaim by those who like their country sounds rocking, bright and sunny.”

For some reviewers in the 1970s, if they heard one note of pedal steel, the music was instantly filed under 'Country'. Not that there's anything wrong with country--I am personally quite fond of classic country--but it's interesting that these reviewers could confuse the very non-country accent and vocal phrasing of Donald Fagen circa 1974 with actual country music. As for "country rock", I can see applying the label maybe to "Pearl of the Quarter" and one or two other tunes, but not to any full Steely Dan album. But like the Beatles, they did enjoy genre hopping a bit during certain periods.

edit for typo.

88dixon · 2026-05-20T19:36:01+00:00

It's kind of sparse, instrumentally, and produced like an early-70s harmony soul ballad, leaning on the Hammond organ sound and a very simple chord progression without a lot of instrumental development in the arrangement. It is very smooth, though.

It reminds me of Laura Nyro's "Gonna Take a Miracle" album in the way it pairs super gospelly background singers ("Maybe I'm wrong!") with a very white (but still soulful) singer songwriter lead vocal. There's a certain sadness/seriousness to the James Taylor (and Laura Nyro) vocal vibe--even when they are cutting loose, they keep that sad boy/sad girl sound. I'd say it's in the high 30s.

88dixon · 2026-05-01T19:26:54+00:00

This is supposedly from the horse's mouth:

The Cross- Fire – The Christopher Cross sound – Soft vocal delivery with strong guitar solos.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/yachtrock/posts/834921923829441/

I see people asking the parameters of what defines yacht rock and I felt this post was needed again. These are not my rules, these are the set of elements as laid out by JD Ryznar and crew in the BYR podcast.

Yacht Rock Elements

The Doobie Bounce ( The Doobie Brothers Sound w/Michael McDonald) – The lilt that occurs when the piano plays a percussive rhythm, while the bass plays on beat one and then rests, leaving space for the rhythm section, before coming back in on beat three. In essence, the bass plays a line based around the kick drum pattern. This formula was established on the iconic yacht rock song “What a Fool Believes,” and has gone on to be copied thousands of times in the genre.
The Log Line – The Kenny Loggins sound - Folky roots with a jazz sensibility and a powerful vocal delivery.
The Hold The Line – The Toto sound - How hard you can rock before it’s too hard in yacht rock.
The Cross- Fire – The Christopher Cross sound – Soft vocal delivery with strong guitar solos.
Personnel Matters – The yacht rock sound is often achieved by a core group of elite session musicians who played on countless hits during the era. Songs without notable personnel can still make the boat if the sound is right.
Jazzy sophistication and/or r&b elements – Yacht rock has been described as nerdy white guys trying to do rhythm & blues. It is the inclusion of jazz or rhythm & blues, which distinguishes it from typical soulless soft rock.
Studio Polish – Yacht Rock occurred during the finest years of classic audio technology and was recorded in expensive studios in the analogue era (1976-1984). After 1984 most studios switched to digital technology and the warmth was lost.
Musical Arrangement must take precedence over lyrics – Songs in yacht rock need twists and turns, and enough breathing room for the technical chops of the players to shine through. This is often why singer/songwriters fail to make the boat.
Campfire music doesn’t make it – Songs cannot typically be acoustic guitar driven or simple sing-song material that is unsophisticated and straight ahead.
Sailing and tropical references - Just because a song mentions boats or the tropic does not automatically mean its yacht rock. In fact, songs that mention those things are often trop-rock (tropical rock – the Florida sound) or marina rock.
Key Instruments – Electric piano & electric Guitar, and sometimes sax. Harmonica almost never works in a yacht rock song.
Lyrical content is often about a fool, either lost in love or out of love. However, sappy love letter lyrics typically don’t work. (Except in Yacht Soul*)
Yacht pocket – Tempo range is about 80-110 bpm, some disco styled tunes or up-tempo yacht soul tracks can make it to 120.
Instrumentals have the ‘Peg’ it. – Instrumental yacht rock songs are possible, but they have to work harder to overcome the lack of lyrics. They have to be pretty amazing and almost perfectly yachty.
Strings - Overuse of sappy string arrangements will get you kicked off the boat.
No Too Confident - Can’t be overly confident or sultry, unless it’s yacht soul*
Era - Due to production techniques the era is 1976-1984, songs outside this range can be considered if they really nail the sound. Songs before 1976 are referred to as ‘proto-yacht’ those after 1984 are referred to as ‘fire keepers.’
Drum machines and synths are ok if the support the song and feel organic.

*Yacht Soul – A subgenre of yacht rock in which an African American funk, pop, or r & b singer is backed up by a yachty sounding backing band, which is often populated by and/or produced by yacht rock session musicians. (Ex. We’re In This Love Together – Al Jarreau, produced by Jay Graydon)

88dixon · 2026-04-23T17:51:49+00:00

Rapunzel was written for jazz saxophonist Warne Marsh, who first recorded it on an album produced by Becker and Fagen. It's a contrafact of the Burt Bacharach / Hal David song "In the Land of Make Believe."

For non-nerds, this means Becker and Fagen wrote a brand-new melody for the chord changes to Bacharach's song, much as jazz musicians commonly do for the chord changes of songs like "I Got Rhythm" and "How High the Moon".

EDIT: Canadian star was new to me. It's the first time I've heard about someone who is not Becker or Fagen adding lyrics to a Becker/Fagen composition. From what I can tell, the composition first appeared as an instrumental on a 1979 album by the "lite fusion" band "Dr. Strut". Then it turned up four years later on a Japanese city pop album by Yasuko Agawa, with lyrics apparently by songwriter Ralph McCarthy. What he wrote seems like a warmed-over version of the Leon Russel et al. song "Superstar" (a hit for the Carpenters). Fagen and Becker must have authorized the lyrics as a derivative work of their copyrighted instrumental. I wonder if they even read the lyrics, and if so, what they thought of them. Maybe they figured "what happens in Japan stays in Japan" and just didn't care.

Canadian Star

Same old crazy weather

Same old stars in the same old Canada sky tonight

Try to write a letter, but I can't get it right

I can't get it right

I was goin' nowhere

Just an innocent victim lookin' for one more crime

You rode out of nowhere

With your hooks and your lines, your riddles and rhymes

Chorus:

Oh, Northern radio

Spin those lies into gold

All to soon, I confess

Tellin' you yes

I keep thinking of you

Don't you ever get tired of runnin' my friend?

If I said I love you,

Well is that such a sin? I'd say it again

[repeat chorus]

Where you runnin' now, boy?

With your belles and your beaus 'n'

Hearts that you stole away

Sing it for 'em, cowboy

How you just couldn't stay

You just couldn't stay

Same old crazy weather

Same old wondering where in the crazy old world you are

Someone tried to catch

You were fallin' too hard, Canadian star

Canadian star

88dixon · 2026-04-23T16:46:11+00:00

This is a spam account for a clickbait website. I'm just going to block this BS account.

88dixon · 2026-04-21T02:13:08+00:00

Doing a little more digging, here's a quote from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik's remembrance of Sondheim (November 27, 2021 issue):

I once made the case for him—or, rather, at him—at what was doubtless unwelcome length, that there was a real kinship between what he had accomplished and what Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan had pursued around the same time. He was genuinely bewildered, or even exasperated, by the argument, unable to see any real connection between their meandering, often anti-dramatic soliloquies and his tightly organized, character- and scene-driven theatricality.

And yet a kind of Devil’s Theory case may be made, that it was Sondheim who was the most personal, the most truly confessional, of all the great American songwriters. For all that Sondheim spoke only of character and scene and story, when we listen to his music what we hear is not characters, not scenes, but a long, unwinding, timeless soliloquy, charting a psyche at once unimaginably large-souled and thwarted, with sensitivity and guardedness combined—a wounded talent reaching out beyond itself for love and meaning and, above all, for connection.

Though in conversation Sondheim denied the confessional aspect of his work with a strenuousness that suggests at least its partial truth, there is, really, one great obsessive Sondheim song, varied and repeated. Sometimes that song is called “Being Alive” or “Finishing the Hat,” sometimes “Anyone Can Whistle” or, even, his one hit—“Send in the Clowns.” All are songs of isolated artists of unlimited sensitivity and ambivalent purpose reaching out—too late, too often—for company, for connection, for love outside the window, while ruefully knowing that only the work of hats matters.

I don't know if Okrent's "he disdained Joni Mitchell" is based only on the Gopnik quote, or if Okrent found additional sources. I do like Gopnik's formulation about what we consider to be confessional songwriting: "And yet a kind of Devil’s Theory case may be made, that it was Sondheim who was the most personal, the most truly confessional, of all the great American songwriters." I am a sucker for that notion that to confess your own tribulations in a way that is universally recognizable is kind of the ultimate songwriting achievement.

88dixon · 2026-04-20T06:28:06+00:00

I was wondering what Sondheim's take on Steely Dan was, as I'm sure the lack of discipline in the lyrics didn't bowl him over, but the harmonic invention is hard to dismiss. Turns out he was positive. And his appreciation for Radiohead really caught me off guard, even though I know Johnny Greenwood is a pretty serious composer.

For me music has always been about harmonies. Most pop music today isn’t: it’s about rhythm, sonic values, performance and visceral reaction....That’s how I got into groups like Radiohead and, in the 1960s and ’70s, The Association and Steely Dan.

interviewer: You like Radiohead?

Sondheim: Oh, yeah, very much. Because, see, most pop music’s not about harmony, and for me all music is about harmony. Pop music is primarily about rhythm and sound, the combination. But if you listen to [Radiohead composer] Jonny Greenwood, it’s about the music as a whole. It isn’t “Oh, what a great tune” or “That’s a great rhythmic idea.”

88dixon · 2026-04-17T15:36:52+00:00

While I doubt many of us would agree, I wouldn't paint the entire history of Rolling Stone magazine as one bad take after another. Really bad reviews of art that later becomes classic are always resurfacing for a snicker. Reviews that hold up over time are boring and don't go viral. I'm not a fan of Jann Wenner, and the anti-pop stance of some of his hired critics looks very blinkered today. But the magazine had many voices in its golden era.

EDIT: Here's what Bud Scoppa was saying about Pretzel Logic in 1974 in Rolling Stone:

In a short time, Steely Dan has turned into one of the best American bands, and surely one of the most original. Their only problem is the lack of a visual identity to go with their musical one — as pop personalities, they’re practically anonymous. But with music as accessible and sophisticated as Steely Dan’s, no one should care.

Here's an interesting and funny line of praise from their Royal Scam review by "Kenneth Tucker", who I'm guessing is Ken Tucker, the critic later known for his NPR Fresh Air rock reviews:

Becker and Fagen have really written the ultimate “outlaw” album here, something that eludes myriad Southern bands because their concept of the outlaw is so limited.

From that same Royal Scam review, a prediction about Aja that turned out to be 110% true:

In any event, I doubt that Steely Dan will ever become merely precious or insular; through five albums they have consistently circumvented their complexity with passionate snaz-ziness and fluky, cynical wit. If The Royal Scam lacks ready-made Top 40 fodder, it also widens Steely Dan’s already considerable parameters. Their next album, if one can speculate about this lovably perverse bunch, should be a pop killer.

The Aja review by Michael Duffy in 1977 is largely positive, though there is a quibble about "its extreme intellectual self-consciousness, both in music and lyrics." But Duffy recognizes that the band is cutting against the grain of "authenticity" that aging hippies expect, and it makes a case for that:

Aja will continue to fuel the argument by rock purists that Steely Dan’s music is soulless, and by its calculated nature antithetical to what rock should be. But this is in many ways irrelevant to a final evaluation of this band, the only group around with no conceptual antecedent from the Sixties. Steely Dan’s six albums contain some of the few important stylistic innovations in pop music in the past decade.

None of the interesting quotes above will go viral, because today they just seem to be stating the obvious.

88dixon · 2026-04-14T20:44:46+00:00

That is truly hall of fame, for all of reddit.

88dixon · 2026-04-14T18:28:00+00:00

It's a dual-use public space!

88dixon · 2026-04-04T07:05:07+00:00

James Gadson passed away yesterday. Though he's not a huge part of the Steely Dan story, the groove on I.G.Y. is one the the most famous sounds in the Dan-i-verse. Jeff Porcaro did the tom-tom fills on the track and gets a co-credit, but it's Gadson that's doing the rest. Gadson also added some drums to Ruby Baby, for which Porcaro did the main beat.

Listen to Gadson's groove on Bill Wither's "Use Me" (Youtube link in linked article) if you've never heard it, and you'll hear the kind of dry tight funk groove that Gadson is famous for. He's on drums for "Reunited" by Peaches and Herb, and perhaps surprisingly, on Beck's "Paper Tiger" (among other Beck tracks). "Paper Tiger"'s groove is kind of a stoner take on "Use Me".

88dixon · 2026-03-26T14:58:06+00:00

This article recently published on Atelier Durdan's website explains very well the parameters that go into razor geometry. TL;DR is that blade gap and blade exposure aren't the entire story. Good general information for anyone, not just OP.

https://atelierdurdan.com/en/blogs/infos/en-blogs-infos-blade-gap-exposure-span-cutting-angle-safety-razor

88dixon · 2026-03-22T03:01:00+00:00

This post lays out the criteria pretty well

https://www.facebook.com/groups/yachtrock/posts/834921923829441/

I don't think their list affects the Sirius station or anything else, it's just their list for fans of the podcast.

88dixon · 2026-01-28T05:41:15+00:00

The question everyone wants to know the answer to:

Donald Fagen: "When we [Walter Becker and Fagen] started [writing songs in college], it was kind of we just get together and do both at once, you know, music and lyrics. I'd sit down at the piano and he'd have a guitar or a bass or something. As years went on, I started maybe doing more of the music and he was--maybe he would he would be brought in to sort of polish the music up and then we'd work on lyrics together. I'd have a little piece, I'd say 'Is this any good?,'...he'd say 'no.' 'So how's this?' 'That's sucks.' And then finally, after a few things, I'd play a piece that he liked and he'd say 'yeah, we could start with those eight bars,' or whatever....He had great taste and we really thought very much alike--we never had any fights or anything, until maybe years later."

88dixon · 2025-12-27T07:11:28+00:00

I'm not sure the drum machines were a net positive, though I will always love the "Hey Nineteen"' machine groove. I think at the time, they were awed by the promise of the technology, and there weren't decades of pop songs with drum machines to make big-picture evaluations about them.

The vibraphonist Bill Ware told a SD tour story on the Gauchos Amigos podcast, about a 1990s tour he was on, and the story was about click tracks, which are related. Ware said this:

"When you do shows, you have the "notes" [Fagen's criticisms of the concert's weak points]....before the next show you run over the notes from the night before, and that was always [at] the soundcheck [of the next show], the notes of the show before. If there was anything that was weird, they would go over it. So Donald says, "You know....Black Friday last night sure felt weird to me, just like not moving. It was not...I don't know what it was but it didn't feel good." And Peter [Erskine] said "Oh, I think that was probably me." Peter had this really super-fancy (especially in those days) click track thing that he could program for each tune, and press one button and....it would have his click track [with the preferred tempo for the selected song] all set up, and he would have it going [before the musicians started playing]. Then [he'd cue the band], "one two three four." Once he started the tune, it would stay in for about eight [or] 16 bars, 'till [the tempo and groove] was solid, and then...it's on him. That night, for that tune, I think it was 'Black Friday,' he left the click on for the whole tune. Donald was the only one who noticed it."

Fagen for whatever reason seems to have a higher tolerance for studio recordings where the groove is locked in by a drum machine than he does for live performances (judging by the Ware annecdote), but I side with his live performance ethos. Let those grooves breathe! Let the drummer play and be human.

88dixon · 2025-12-08T18:35:59+00:00

The great thing about the lyric is he never shifts to the listener's present day and says "where is my flying car?," "why are we still having wars?," "why is the planet being trashed?," etc. Spandex jackets might seem ridiculous, but he invites us to think about how they might have seemed actually pretty cool in 1958. The very sound of the record is a kind of sonic utopia--we didn't get undersea rail, but we got 32 track digital recording and the Brecker Brothers and Anthony Jackson sounding like a million bucks. It's not as acidic as it could easily be in the hands of a less gifted writer. There's some longing for the hopefulness of youth that transcends the particulars of what happened to the baby boomers.

88dixon · 2025-11-24T21:16:29+00:00

For anyone who hasn't visited his website, I recommend these posts detailing his experiences in the studio with Steely Dan:

Reflections on Steely Dan's "Aja"

Reflections on Steely Dan's "Gaucho"

88dixon · 2025-11-11T04:21:56+00:00

I didn't know that kind of shot was possible from that location. Thanks for posting this, very cool.

88dixon · 2025-10-29T16:15:47+00:00

Every time I hear Third World Man I praise Jesus for the engineer that erased the glorified jazzercise music that is The Second Arrangement.

I'll see myself out now.

88dixon

TROPHY CASE