February 26, 2006
Music
What Rhymes With Orange Alert?
By FRED KAPLAN
THIS is my death album," Donald Fagen said in his office on the Upper
East Side of Manhattan. "It's about the death of culture, the death of
politics, the beginning of the end of my life." Then he mock-sobbed,
"Boo hoo hoo."
Mr. Fagen, best known as the vocalizing half of the rock band Steely
Dan, turned 58 years old in January. His new CD, "Morph the Cat," is
his first solo album in 13 years, and he's kicking it off with an
18-city concert tour, starting this Wednesday - his first live shows
with his own band ever.
He wrote "Morph the Cat" in the wake of Sept. 11, and it's an album
about fellow New Yorkers dealing with the aftershocks - tales of love
and dread in a time of terror.
One of its eight songs, a ballad called "The Night Belongs to Mona" is
about a woman who stays cooped up in her Chelsea high-rise. At one
point, Mr. Fagen, playing one of Mona's worried friends, sings, "Was it
the fire downtown/ that turned her world around?" It's the album's only
reference to the World Trade Center. But the attack lingers as a
constant backdrop.
"The Great Pagoda of Funn" is about two lovers who stay together as
shelter from the world's horrors, itemized by a choir of background
singers: "Poison skies/ and severed heads/ and pain and lies ..."
"I wrote that after several beheadings in Iraq," Mr. Fagen said. "You
can thank Mr. Zarqawi for that song."
"Security Joan" is a comic blues about a man who swoons for an airport
guard while rushing to catch a plane.
When I felt her wand sweep over me
You know I never felt so clean
Girl you won't find my name on your list
Honey you know I ain't no terrorist ...
The album's finale, "Mary Shut the Garden Door," sounds like the score
for a spooky political thriller. Mr. Fagen's liner notes describe it:
"Paranoia blooms when a thuggish cult gains control of the government."
"I wrote that song right after the Republican Convention took over New
York," he said. "I'm afraid of religious people in general - any
adult who believes in magic." It's a gloomy number - the doo-wop
background singers chant, "They won/ Storms raged/ Things changed/
Forever" - but it holds out a thin hope in its last line: "This
ballad is for lovers/ with something left to lose."
That's a contrast to the most recent Steely Dan album, 2003's
"Everything Must Go." It too was produced in the shadow of 9/11, but it
responded to catastrophes with mordant retreat ("the long sad Sunday of
the early resigned") or down-with-the-ship partying ("Let's switch off
the lights/ and light up all the Luckies/ Crankin' up the afterglow").
All nine Steely Dan albums over the past 34 years - which Mr. Fagen
wrote with Walter Becker, his musical partner since their undergraduate
days at Bard College - dwell to some degree on destruction and
doomsday, but usually with black humor or a diffident shrug. "Morph the
Cat" has the familiar Steely Dan sound: the dense chords, jazz vamps,
laser backbeat, skylark guitar riffs and sly lyrics - polished
narratives of insouciant irony and cryptic allusions - sung by Mr.
Fagen in a nasal troubadour's wail. But this time, he's staring at the
darkness with open apprehension.
"Part of the difference," he said, "is that Walter's more snarky than I
am. He's more realistic; I'm more of a fantasist, a romantic. Walter
has that side, too. But when we write together, we assume this
collective guise - this guy you could call Dan - who isn't either
of us, really. Dan's a much colder dude. Or maybe he just seems cold.
Maybe he's afraid to show his emotions; that's more likely."
Cut loose from Dan, Mr. Fagen writes songs that are "more personal," he
said, "and, as it turns out, more autobiographical." The keys to this
chapter of his chronicle are not just the attack on his city but also
the death of his mother, in January 2003, after a long bout with
Alzheimer's disease.
"It was a horrible death, very agitated toward the end," he recalled.
The album is dedicated to her. "In memory of Elinor Rosenberg Fagen, a
k a Ellen Ross," the liner notes read. "Ellen Ross was her stage name,"
he explained. "She was a professional singer from the age of 5 years to
15. She was the Shirley Temple of the Catskills. Her mother would take
her up there in the summers to sing in a hotel. One time, the guy who
owned the hotel took her over to an amateur-hour radio show. She had an
anxiety attack. That was the end of her career."
While Mr. Fagen was growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, his mother
sang show tunes around the house, encouraged him to play piano, and
took him into Manhattan on weekends to see Broadway musicals. "I got
most of my musical theory from her," he said.
"Morph the Cat" begins with the title song, which sounds like an R.
Crumb cartoon theme about a cat named Morph who flies above Manhattan
and seeps into apartments, spreading good cheer. But when the tune is
reprised at the end of the album, after the songs about severed heads
and so forth, Morph (as in Morpheus, god of dreams?) seems more
menacing.
"Yeah, the cat is narcotizing the citizens," Mr. Fagen said. "I observe
it in people, this mind-death, these layers of brain-washing that's
gone on for so many years. It's in the techniques of political
machines, the unbelievable stupidity on television." He stopped and
raised his eyebrows. "Hey, maybe Morph is television."
Then he backed away, chuckling. "I refuse to take responsibility for
any interpretation," he mumbled.
Last week, he was busy rehearsing for his tour. Steely Dan gave up live
performance in 1974. "I burned myself out quickly, my voice was getting
tired, I was in my mid-20's, my lifestyle wasn't very healthy." Mr.
Fagen recalled. After he and Mr. Becker broke up the band in 1980 (a
split that lasted 16 years) , "I didn't have the confidence in myself
to organize a band and a tour without him."
In the late 80's, he met a producer, Libby Titus, whom he later
married. "She was putting together what she called these 'horrid little
evenings,' " he said, concerts with several big-name pop singers,
performing one after another. Mr. Fagen joined them. At first, he just
played piano; then, under her prodding, he sang again, too. "So," he
said, "I got back into it a bit."
Still, his element is the studio. Last August, he sat in a booth at
Avatar Studios, in Midtown, with his engineer, Elliot Scheiner. Mr.
Fagen had spent a year recording the album's tracks. Now it was time to
mix them. He and Mr. Becker were notorious perfectionists in mixing the
Steely Dan sessions. That part hasn't changed.
"Mmmm, bring the snare down in those two bars by one-tenth," Mr. Fagen
said, listening to the rhythm tracks of "Mona." He meant one-tenth of a
decibel, a minuscule adjustment in volume.
Later, listening to the horn tracks, he said, "After the first bop-bop,
you've got to bring up the da-bop."
Then the vocal tracks. Hearing himself sing the line, "To see how the
story ends," he said, "The first syllable of 'story' is a little hard;
bring it down two-tenths." Another line, "When you're already dressed
in black," was a little soft. "Bring up the whole line one-tenth." He
listened again. "Maybe only the end of the line - "dee dressed in
black" - bring just that up one-tenth."
After five hours mixing, he said, "I'm wearying of this," in a
stentorian tone. He got up, stretched, sat down, and went back at it
for two more hours.
Soon, Mr. Fagen hopes to remix his previous solo disc, the 1993
"Kamakiriad." His voice on that album was buried: too soft and
indistinct. "I was in my self-loathing period," he said.
The remix will be part of a three-disc box-set, which Reprise Records
plans to release later this year, of all three Fagen solo albums,
starting with "The Nightfly" (1982), his wistful look back at his
cold-war adolescence. "I see them as Youth, Middle Age and Death," he
said with a crooked smile.
But if "Morph the Cat" is "Death," what will he do for an encore?
In an e-mail note, Mr. Fagen replied, "just one of those cringe-worthy
duet albums: you know, me and gwen stefani, me and tony bennett, me and
gladys knight ... also some tricked-up duets with dead people: nat king
cole, tiny tim, mae west, etc."
But those aren't booked. What is likely, he said, is another tour with
his new band this summer and probably some gigs with his musical
companion of youth and middle age, Mr. Becker. Just because you've done
death doesn't mean you're done with Dan.
Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/arts/music/26kapl.html
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