Donald Fagen Quotations

When you get a groove going, time flies.

I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.

Anthemic rock music is inherently fascist - anything intended to move huge masses of people is politically offensive to me.

I have a critical nature, in the sense that when I look at something I often look for the flaws.

Popularity has everything to do with business and nothing to do with music.

I had trouble distinguishing art from life. I don't now, and I feel much better!

What do you do with what you're given, and how do you transform it into something worthwhile?

People are usually afraid to say what's on their mind.

I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically.

My style is a little quirky. I can't play as fast as most professional jazz players.

I've never been comfortable as a lead performer, and I never wanted to be a singer, particularly.

Randy Newman seemed like an even worse singer than me. I liked Ray Charles, Levi Stubbs, Jack Jones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett.

My writing is really intuitive. As a kid, I went to school in New Jersey and hung out in New York, so the way kids used to talk got into our earlier songs.

September 11, on a global scale, and my mother dying, on a personal level, were the two major things that got me thinking about all of this.

Mortality! It's intimations of mortality. I'm 58, and by that time, more people you know have died. My mother died a few years ago. And being a New Yorker, 9/11 had a lot to do with the mood of the city.

That was one of the elements. Just getting older and also I'm a New Yorker, so 9-11 on a broader level had something to do with it. I work as I go so I have a file of things that go back a few years and I think probably the last Steely Dan album, (2003's) Everything Must Go, had some things on this theme, too. But this is on a more personal level.

It's great to know that our old stuff still sounds good to our fans, just as it's wonderful to think that we've turned a few people on to jazz over the years.

I don't think you can escape the environment we live in now.

I think of Steely Dan as being of its time, and it may be inseparable from its time.

As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.

I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn’t quite happen. I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see.

We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK.

Melodies can be good depending on the context. You can have a simple melody, and if the harmony behind it is interesting, it can make a very simple melody really different. You can also have a complex melody. The more complex it is, the harder it is to sing, and then sometimes it can sound contrived. You could write a melody that would be fine on a saxophone but if you give it to a singer, it can sound raunchy.

What a beautiful world this will be What a glorious time to be free

I've never done it before. I might do a few Steely Dan things that I particularly like, but it'll mainly be my stuff.