Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!
Usually an artist’s popularity wanes after fifty years go by. But nothing about Steely Dan counts as usual. Even in the seventies, their impossibly smooth sound, their obscure yet hyperliterate lyrics, and their focus on the studio in lieu of performing made them stick out like sore thumbs. But Walter Becker, Donald Fagen, and company du jour knew what they wanted, and now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, it turns out to be what people want, need, can’t get enough of. The book Quantum Criminals, portraying the characters in Steely Dan songs with words and paint, was a critical smash, and Rolling Stone just published a listicle ranking every Steely Dan song.
Katy Lied, released fifty years ago this month, saw Becker and Fagen giving up their road-tested bandmates in favor of the best studio musicians money could buy, including twenty-year-old drummer Jeff Porcaro and not-much-older Michael McDonald, whose Doobie Brother days had yet to come. It saw the band getting a little cooler, a little warmer, a little jazzier. Like every Steely Dan album (at least, every one from Steely Dan Mark I), it has champions who say it’s the best thing they ever did. In 1987 Rolling Stone named it to their list of the best 100 albums of the past 20 years, the sole Steely Dan album on that roster. (This, after calling it “exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock” in their review twelve years earlier.)
Steely Dan’s unique combination of iconoclasm and tasty licks make them a band that covering artists tend to approach tentatively, if at all. How many other bands see tribute artists be so eager to throw out the lyrics and take their best instrumental whack at it? You’ll find more than one instrumental in this Katy Lied cover collection, along with live covers and one cover that’s a tribute to another band altogether.
