Sonnet Morpheus

D/A CONVERTER

Playlists embody who we are. We use musical affinities to understand (or at least categorize) others, not only as evidence of their aesthetic discernment but also of their emotional and political affiliations, which amount to an entire worldview. In other words, the database of favorite music that we carry around in our brains is no laughing matter. So, one of the most unexpected—and rewarding—things that can happen in music fandom is a complete and sudden inversion of one’s beliefs. Which brings me to the perennially touchy subject of Steely Dan, a band that cleaves the ranks of listeners like a gold-plated katana.

Here, I’m not talking about the likable, slightly anodyne early records but about late-career (but pre-reunion) Dan, particularly and , on which Donald Fagen and Walter Becker reach an apotheosis of musical complexity and studio perfectionism. These records demand a lot, and listeners tend to either love or hate them. For most of my listening life, I was in the latter camp: To me, they exemplified the sound of the slickest, most airless kind of session playing, and they were “jazzy” in the worst way, meaning they borrowed from the formal language of jazz to create something more commercial and lighter that at times sounded uncomfortably like the sort of music that followed the words “please hold.” Hearing even a few bars from these albums made me shudder. I recall now with real shame that when I happened to meet Fagen while doing research for my first book, I made