Don Breithaupt is the keyboard player, songwriter and lead vocalist for the Los Angeles-based band Monkey House, which treads some of the same jazzy pop and rock territory as Steely Dan. An award-winning songwriter (Socan, Emmy, American Songwriting Competition, International Songwriting Competition and Juno nominations), his music has been performed by Marc Jordan, Catherine Russell, Paul Shaffer, Janis Siegel and numerous others.
The Berklee College alum has written extensively on music and film, including numerous articles for the Canadian newspaper the National Post (he’s a native of Canada) and two books about the pop music of the ’70s. Don Breithaupt joined us to discuss the albums that shaped his career.
STEELY DAN – AJA (1977): By the time Aja, Steely Dan’s crowning achievement, was released in the fall of 1977, I had internalized the contents of the band’s first five albums – and, at 16, was becoming a pretty decent drummer, piano player, and songwriter myself. In short, I was ready for it. I had just started my first part-time job (at EMI’s Canadian retail chain Mister Sound), and happened to be working the day the boxes containing Aja arrived. It was three days before official release day, but you better believe I took home my copy that night. That record didn’t leave my turntable for the rest of that year. It was a clinic in songwriting, arranging, groove, harmony, melody, lyrics, and production. I’ve never gotten over my first listen and, though I’ve played Aja literally thousands of times since then, have never found it to be anything but fresh and completely awe-inspiring.
Anyone familiar with my Monkey House albums knows Steely Dan’s influence on my music is central. When I cold-called David Barker, who was then the editor of Continuum Publishing’s 33-1/3 series, in 2006 to berate him for not having done a Steely Dan book yet, he told me to submit a proposal. Two months later, my pitch was greenlit, and I became the man who wrote the book on Aja! The best part of that deal was my two-hour, one-on-one interview with Donald Fagen about the making of the album, a true pinch-me moment in this boy’s life. At some point in the book, I called Aja “the best record in the Solar System,” and I’ll stand by that — pending late-breaking entries from the outer planets.
JONI MITCHELL – HEJIRA (1976): I didn’t have my Hejira epiphany until three years after it was released. By then I was an English major at university, and one day I found myself at a “listening session” with some of the cool kids. I had a bit of a crush on the girl with the great stereo and the milk crates full of LPs, but I forgot all about her when Side 1 of Hejira started with “Coyote,” Joni’s brilliant ode to Sam Shepard. Full of wildly original poetic insight, and a haunting combination of Joni’s vocals/comping, Jaco Pastorius’s untethered fretless bass, and Larry Carlton’s subtle, bluesy guitar colors, Hejira was perfect. Every track seemed better than the last. My big takeaway was: singer-songwriter music doesn’t have to be folky and raw — it can be as subtle and sophisticated as the most evergreen jazz.
STEVIE WONDER – INNERVISIONS (1973): It was a true privilege to experience Stevie Wonder’s mind-blowing string of hit singles 1971-1977 in real time as an impressionable kid. Every time a new Stevie side came out, it seemed he had reinvented the wheel, groove-wise, harmony-wise, every-wise. Innervisions was the first album of his I owned, and it was brilliant from beginning to end. Every track was utterly original; the record unfolded like relentlessly memorable greatest-hits package. (Stevie’s album cuts could bury anyone else’s career highlights.) When I read, probably in Creem or Hit Parader, that Stevie had basically played, sung, and produced the whole thing himself, I realized I was sharing the planet with a musical genius of epic proportions. To this day, Stevie is a bottomless well of inspiration.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO NOW: My most-played album of 2020 is definitely Pat Metheny’s From This Place. It’s the most compelling thing he’s done in years; the orchestra adds an epic layer to Pat’s typically brilliant compositions. His new piano player, Gwilym Simcock, is blowing my mind too.
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