Surrender to Steely Dan

Music obsessive that I was, this confounded me. Steely Dan—the musical handle of the songwriting pair Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—was considered toxically uncool. Steely Dan was also in the midst of a decades-long hiatus from releasing new studio albums, after putting out seven from 1972 to 1980. I knew the band’s 1974 hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” a steady presence on classic-rock radio, but I had trouble wrapping my head and ears around it. The guy singing in a plaintive, nasal voice seemed pretty sure that Rikki was, in fact, going to lose that number; every time he sang “And you could have a change of hea-a-art,” a gnarled run of notes followed that sounded oddly aggressive. I recognized the bass piano line from Horace Silver’s bossa-jazz chestnut “Song for My Father,” because I’d played it in my own jazz-piano lessons. But what was it doing in a pop song? “Rikki” ’s strange combination of jazz, rock, and R&B, alchemized into a near-frictionless sonic slickness, seemed antithetical to the grunge-era ethos of anti-establishment, heart-on-your-sleeve authenticity.