Nearly three years ago, I received a message from the British DJ, radio host, and Oasis cover boy Sean Rowley. He told me he had started curating compilations for the UK reissue label Ace Records. He’d put together Ladies Sing the Boss, which showcased Bruce Springsteen covers by the likes of Bettye LaVette and Emmylou Harris.
Next, Rowley said, he wanted to do a Steely Dan–related comp.
His initial inclination was to pull together a bunch of covers: Mike Mandel’s take on “Peg,” Ahmad Jamal doing “Black Cow,” and so on. While Dan covers can be enjoyable if done right, we landed during a follow-up conversation on more stimulating thematic territory: songs by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen that never appeared on a Steely Dan album and were released by other artists. We began sending examples to each other and soon had an inventory of about three dozen. Rowley handed over the list of our favorites to Ace.
A few months went by, and word came down that licensing hurdles—which I’d feared might eventually gum up the works—had brought the project to a halt. The news bummed me out; I’d wanted to give listeners high-quality access to the rarities, and it would’ve been interesting to present the songs together in context through the liner notes.
Recently that project was again on my mind, and it reignited my desire to bring the comp to fruition, if only in the digital sphere. The 11 songs discussed below, organized roughly by date from the years 1969 to 1981, are limited to Becker-Fagen collaborations. Future volumes will explore the boys operating in their own lanes: Fagen-penned compositions being cut by such artists as Diana Ross as well as Becker’s cowrites with the producer Larry Klein. Stay tuned!
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