(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
The Velvet Underground. The New York Dolls. A Tribe Called Quest. The Strokes. The legacy of New York City bands in the history of rock ‘n’ roll speaks for itself. Some of the greatest music ever has hailed from its five boroughs. However, outside of NYC lies some serious challengers for their crown. One of the most beloved and respected being Annandale-on-Hudson’s favourite sons, Steely Dan.
While The Dan’s brand of literate, jazz-inflected pop-rock may not scream “Noo Yawk” on the surface, the city flows through both the band’s music and the men who make it. Most notably, you could make a fairly comprehensive guided tour of the city based around the landmarks that have popped up in their lyrics. From Avenue D to Gramercy Park to Harlem and everywhere in between. Clearly, this was a city that mattered to the band.
While this does tend to be the effect The Big Apple has on people, The Dan were exactly the kind of band to vocalise not only how they felt about living in the city, but also leaving it. As major league rock stars, the band were in and out of their native state all the time. Not only for touring purposes but also for recording as well.
During their mid-1970s pomp this often took the band across to the other side of the country, recording the lion’s share of their albums in Los Angeles, California. It wasn’t that the die-hard New Yorkers hated the Golden Coast, but while they were there, they often found themselves writing about how much they missed their home town. This would come to the forefront on their landmark sixth studio album, 1977’s Aja.
How did Steely Dan write about their homesickness?
The band’s ultimate statement of how much they wanted to ditch all this sun and retreat into the cool embrace of New York City came on Aja‘s fifth track ‘Home At Last’. Typically, it came with a defiantly smart-arsed literary metaphor. The kind that would feel like Walter Becker and Donald Fagen rubbing their English degrees in the audiences collective face if it wasn’t so artfully deployed.
In an interview conducted for Our American Stories with Lee Habeeb, Fagen says, “a lot of our songs are about being homesick, I think for New York. [For] ‘Home At Last’, the central metaphor was taken from Ulysses’ big problem, y’know, trying to get back home… it’s essentially just the idea of it. How do you write a little blues about Ulysses?”
By taking inspiration from The Odyssey, the band presents themselves as the captains of a long, arduous voyage home. One where their problems come not just from the distance between them and their home, but also from the myriad of temptations that lie in their way. After all, this is Steely Dan we’re talking about; there’s no way they didn’t use the phrase “tied to the mast” in the chorus without knowing what the full extent of that metaphor would be.
Sure, there may be cooler options for the ultimate New York band. However, in terms of the sheer number of songs they produced celebrating their home state, there may be no band more tied to New York than Steely Dan.
Related Topics
