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Steely Dan
New York, New York 1999
page 2
Do you always know what the song is about prior to writing it?
DF: No. But that's usually what we start with. We might have a clue as to what it's about.
By the time you finish it, is the meaning always clear to you?
WB: To us it is.
DF: In recent years. [Laughs]
WB: Listeners might argue otherwise. But to us we've usually got a pretty good idea very early on - these days - what we're writing about.
Was that different in the old days?
WB: Well, yeah. I think in the old days some of the songs were more, shall we say, more impressionistic. And so -
DF: But we knew what those were about, more or less -
WB: We knew what we were trying to do, but we didn't necessarily know what those were about.
Most songwriters write songs using existing idioms, but you two almost always invent your own.
DF: Well, it's cheating to just take idioms that are in the language.
Is it?
DF: [Laughs] Isn't it?
If the idiom is used in an inventive way, such as "Still Crazy After All These Years," it can work.
WB: That's a perfect example of cheating.
DF: I thought Paul Simon invented "Still Crazy After All These Years." But maybe I'm wrong.
WB: Then it's not cheating if he did. Then he's just doing what we're doing.
Your new album starts with "Gaslighting Abbie," which seems like a newly invented idiom--
DF: Right. Well, the slang word `to gaslight' is something I've heard used-- actually, I've never heard it used outside of New York City. [Laughs] It usually was from a woman who is usually accusing me of gaslighting --
WB: [Laughs]
DF: The word `gaslighting' comes from the film Gaslight where Charles Boyer tries to convince Ingrid Bergman that she's crazy. So it's kind of a synonym for mind-fucking -
WB: A certain kind of mind-fucking, where the method by which this was accomplished was by manipulating the physical reality in such a way that the person would be cold all the time, or by lowering the gaslights all the time making it so that the rooms were getting darker and darker. That sort of thing.
DF: Stealing clothes and things like that. Or denying that something happened that actually did happen.
"Jack Of Speed" is another new idiom you've created.
DF: Yeah, that one represents the personification of a kind of demonic obsession.
WB: We just felt that "Good King Psylosibin" was too hard to sing. [Laughs] So we decided to go with "Jack Of Speed."
I love that line about trading fours with the Jack of Speed.
WB: [Laughs]
DF: Yeah, that's scary. You know, the Jack of Speed is very competitive. If you're trading fours with the Jack of Speed, you'd really have to be on your toes.
WB: Yeah, talk about your cutting contests. [Laughter]
DF: Yeah, really.
The use of original idioms ensures that songs retain some mystery, and don't ever seem dated..
DF: Yeah, they don't become dated that much. At least the greater part of them.
WB: Well, I guess they also don't become dated because they're not tied to the slang of twenty years ago.
DF: Yeah, though the slang of twenty years ago seems to have been completely recouped and is back in circulation.
WB: Some of it.
DF: I think maybe we got some of that because when we were kids we were both big science fiction fans, and sci-fi writers, at least in those days, is invent slang, because they're writing about the future. For instance, there may be some kind of technology that they're inventing so they will invent slang words for the technology. Just the way we invent slang words for current technology.
You've often used words that originate in science fiction, such as in "Two Against Nature," when you say, "You've got to grok the shape of things unknown…"
DF: Yes, `grok' is also a pre-existing term.
WB: `Grok' is from Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.
DF: Twenty years ago that word was used more than it is now.
WB: Let's say thirty years ago. [Laughs] It was part of the sixties currency.
DF: `To grok' meant to understand something, to see its deeper meaning -
WB: At an intuitive level, yeah.
You said that using existing idioms is cheating, yet you both love Dylan, who has used existing idioms such as "a simple twist of fate" repeatedly through the years.
WB: Well, Bob Dylan started out and in some ways never moved that far away from the idea of being a folk musician. In which genre you sort of are permitted to recycle a chord change or a melody or a lyrical idea. I think that's essentially what it means to be a folk musician. You are going to be recycling musical and/or lyrical ideas. Or personalizing them in a variety of ways. There's something about the economy of someone like Bob Dylan. There's a great economy that allows him to focus his energies on what is really important to him. And I think that's probably part of his genius, and what made him so productive over the years.
His is the complete opposite of your approach in the studio. Not only will Dylan not write out his chords, he won't even say what they are - You have to watch his hands.
WB: Right. Certainly we couldn't get away with that. "Watch my hands" wouldn't work for us. [Laughter] Even in the best of circumstances.
Yeah, it is the opposite of what we do. And I think we feel that an integral part of what we're doing has more to do with the presentation and production, the sound of the record, perfected arrangements, and stuff like that.
Like Dylan, some of your lyrics are clear narratives and others are quite cryptic. Yet those songs also never age, because there are new possibilities in them. Is it sometimes better that meaning not be obviously understandable?
WB: No, I think, depending on what the song is and what it's about, it's more or less important that I have a very comprehensible narrative to it. And I think for example, a song like "What A Shame About Me" on the new record, I can't imagine anyone having any trouble knowing what that's about. Whereas a song like "Two Against Nature," people ask us about quite a bit and sort of wonder about it. And particularly foreign people who are sort of confused about what might be meant by the idea of "Two Against Nature," or who don't recognize any of the names of those demons. The figures of the voodoo pantheon there. Which must just seem like a lot of confusing names to some people, I'm sure. Or a song like "Gaslighting Abbie," if you don't know about the movie Gaslight and that expression, you're screwed, right? You have no idea what that's about. And yet if you do know that, then I think you can make sense out it.
But even if you don't, it's still intriguing and has a lot of resonance-
WB: Yes, it's still intriguing and it has a lot of resonance. And I think there's a lot of times when I will read something, and I'll like it and be taken with it before I completely know what it is. And then there's other cases, with Bob Dylan songs and so on, there's such a series of kaleidoscopic images and surrealistic imagery that it's hard to categorize it in your mind what it is. It's something that you experience, and it sort of reinvents itself every time you hear it because it's so allusive.
I think there is something to be said for the idea that something can retain some element of mystery. That is very likable. And I think our new songs, generally speaking, are less obscure than they might have been at other times earlier in our career. It was the seventies back then, and the sixties weren't far behind. [Laughter] We felt free to take appropriate liberties. At the same time, I think what we're doing has gotten a little clearer, don't you?
Yes. And your use of the language and specific details, even when the meaning is not immediately obvious, such as "now you're the wonderwaif of Gramercy Park," from "Janie Runaway," are so great.
WB: [Laughs ] We certainly were pleased with that. We probably sat there for two hours trying to come up with that line. We had all different parts of the city. We had "Another year of dogpatch would have done you in." [Laughs] Let's see: "My waif queen," "My waif supreme," "waif mistress," "the baroness of my Wall Street loft," "now you're the princess of Van Damme Street," "Now you're the baroness of Elizabeth Street," "of Irving Place," "of Waverly Place." We had "Dixie Runaway," "Susie Runaway," "Polly Runaway," "Molly Runaway," "Annie Runaway."
We have notes which define the idea of certain songs. For "West Of Hollywood" we had, "Ideal flatness of field, leveling, nulling out, zero potential, the tyranny of the disallowed."
When your lyrics get mathematical like that, or "the axis of pain/pleasure sheared the arc of desire," it sounds like some of language in your solo album, Walter, as in "Surf And/or Die."
WB: I think when we hone in one something, it's hard to tell who it came from. The original version of that line was "The axis of pain/pleasure distended the calculus of desire." Which I actually liked better. But try singing it that way sometime. The one we came up with was a little more singable that that.
That smooth singability is a hallmark of your work.
DF: Yeah, well, it's hard to sing those tongue-twisty words. It has to sound good.
WB: Things have to meet a minimum standard of singability.
DF: There have been times when we couldn't figure out any way to say something and so we moved up to rougher language. But generally speaking there is a way to do it when you get both the sound and the meaning.
When you're working together on a song together, how do you go about it?
DF: In recent years we usually start out with me on acoustic piano and Walter on guitar. And then when we have something it's transferred into some kind of sequencing program so that we have something to work with that sounds a little like a track. And Walter usually works the computer. [Laughs]
WB: That's true.
How conscious is your process when working to create new music?
DF: Sometimes it's not conscious at all. Sometimes it comes from just messing around with a cassette recorder on. And other times there are effects you hear in music that you try to store up in your mind. And you think about what will this effect sound like in a different context than you found it in.
A sound effect?
WB: A harmonic effect.
DF: A certain tension or atmosphere of a certain harmony and/or melody. Even down to the timbres. For example, there are things in Duke Ellington's music I know I've used. He was amazing at coming up with original pieces of sound. Because of the guys in the band and the ways it was arranged and the chord progressions and the melodies and the ranges that he put the instruments in. For instance, you will hear something in there and you will come to a certain place when writing a song and I'll play a certain thing that might remind me of that. And then I'll see what would happen if I used a similar progression or somehow assimilated that effect right here in this context.
When you are working on the lyrics, do you do with the music?
DF: Generally. We have an idea of the rhythm of the melody and sometimes the melody itself.
WB: Usually we have the melody by the time we write the lyrics.
And you always write lyrics together?
DF: Yeah. Almost all of them.
What is your main objective when working on a lyric?
DF: Mostly it has to do with what's the most entertaining. If you can come up with something that's funny in some way or tells the story in an amusing way, that's best. Or little details. Someone will come up with a detail that is very telling about the character. It might be more like writing stories than actual lyrics sometimes.
Do you plot out the story before writing the song together?
DF: Yes, but sometimes we might not know how it ends.
WB: You get the general idea and then you see where it takes you. I noticed on the songs we just wrote, for example, by the time we were finished with the song we'll have a couple of pages sometime of lyric material and ideas and conceptual stuff about the character and the situation that we didn't use. Either lyrics that we rejected, or just back story, if you will.
DF: Yeah, sometimes we will have two or three pages of junk we came up with as notes about a story or a character.
WB: It's just like a short story writer or a novelist would work in some cases to develop an elaborate back story and a set of impressions that you then draw from-
DF: The reader doesn't have to know the whole back story, but we have to know it -
WB: We have to know it to write the song.
(continued ...)
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