Few bands achieved their fame as head-scratchingly as Steely Dan. They weren’t rock-star handsome, they stopped touring after their third album and they rarely spoke to the media (and were often ...

This essay is adapted from Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay’s “Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. A few months after Steely Dan co-founder ...

You could fill a book with all the shady characters you meet in Steely Dan songs. Quantum Criminals is that book. Journalist Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay take a deep dive into the genius of ...

Steely Dan has been more of a conceptual framework for inventive music-making than a typical rock band. Spearheaded by a pair of resourceful musical auteurs Donald Fagen and Walter Becker - they have ...

This article was first published on All About Jazz on April 20, 2019. The website Really Smooth Music provides the definition of the term Yacht Rock as being "a variation of popular Soft Rock that ...

This interview originally appeared in NPR Music's weekly newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter here. Steely Dan is a paradox. As writer Alex Pappademas puts it, it's a "cult band whose catalog ...

This is FRESH AIR. Rock critic Ken Tucker has noticed that there are a number of significant albums that are celebrating their 50th anniversary. And he's decided to devote a summer series to ...

One of the strangest (and most heartwarming) developments in recent years is the hip-ification of 1970s snarky jazz-rock institution Steely Dan. Once the butt of endless “graying ponytail” jokes by ...

On September 3rd, 2017, the world lost another musical legend - Walter Becker, one-half of the duo that named themselves after a metallic sex toy from a William S. Burroughs novel, Steely Dan. Becker ...

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. Music obsessive that ...