Fully completed Steely Dan studio recordings not officially released are rare. Steely Dan covers are rare. Last Thursday (07/07/22), we got surprised by the revelation of a track that intersects both rarities: an early aughts recording of Steely Dan performing Joni Mitchell’s “Carey.”
Spun off as a single from Mitchell’s breakthrough album Blue, that song barely charted for Joni in late summer of 1971, debuting at #93 on the Billboard Hot 100 and quickly dropping out afterwards, but has endured as one of her classic songs.
By the time there was an effort to assemble a “various artists” Joni Mitchell tribute album around 2001, it was no brainer to include “Carey” in the collection and someone had the idea to get Steely Dan to do the honors. They obliged and even knocked it out inside of a week; “a veritable wind sprint” as Walter Becker might say.
Depending on which account you believe, the tribute album project to be dubbed A Case of Joni either got scrapped or eventually released as A Tribute to Joni Mitchell – sans the Steely Dan cover – in 2007. It’s unclear at this writing how and why “Carey” managed to sit in solitary confinement for some twenty years and what prompted its sudden appearance now. But it’s here, so let’s dig in.
Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell never intersected so directly as they did with this song, but there are certainly parallels. Perhaps the strongest one being is that both acts started out as very good folk-based songwriters who got even better as they incorporated more jazz elements into their music. They even shared many of the same ace session musicians.
Put another way, you could make a much worse choice for a band to cover Joni than Steely Dan.
For some reason Donald Fagen’s vocals remind me of the way he sings “H Gang” from his Morph the Cat solo album; maybe it’s that similar groove bubbling underneath. Except, when he does a very unusual falsetto which is in keeping with Mitchell doing the same on her version. We don’t have a personnel listing for Steely Dan’s “Carey” but I feel pretty sure that’s a Walter Becker guitar solo.
Does this rank up there with “Here at the Western World” or even the Flo & Eddie version of “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” as one of Steely Dan’s best leftover tracks? Probably not. Still and all, it’s a treat out of nowhere. Dandom, rejoice.
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