Enough gushing about guitars, saxes and drums. Here are Steely Dan’s five best miscellaneous performances, as selected by our panel.

Here are Steely Dan’s five best bass performances, selected in tandem by our panel of Steely Dan authorities.

S. Victor Aaron picks five standout Steely Dan ballads.

It’s something we’ve visited before, but many Steely Dan songs touch on topics from Becker and Fagen’s youth in the 1960s (see “Boston Rag”, “My Old School”). Donald Fagen would later explicitly make an entire album recounting his aspirations and hopes from the late 1950s and early ’60s; I thinkRead More

A country love song delivered almost without any detectable irony is what follows “My Old School” on Countdown To Ecstasy. The charm of Countdown is it being full of styles and devices Becker and Fagen never visited again You May Also Like: Steely Dan, “Bodhisattva” from ‘Northeast Corridor’ (2021): SteelyRead More

Steely Dan’s “My Old School” features a boss, brassy Stax sound plopped right into a piano-driven hard shuffle – making this a fun, foot-stomping number.

Rick Derringer’s gloriously greasy slide guitar assured that “Show Biz Kids” would stand as one of Steely Dan’s better deep cuts.

A singer referenced in this Steely Dan song was best known for ‘Stripsody,’ where she used her voice to mimic comic-book sounds.

There aren’t a whole lot of lyrics to this Steely Dan song, but I’ve never been quite able to decipher them. No one else seems to be too sure what they mean, either.

Walter Becker once called himself as a “B+” guitarist. He’s certainly underrated there but as a bassist, I’d rate him even higher. Nonetheless, Becker had a history of making way for another bassist to play on a Steely Dan tune if he thought if that person was the better manRead More