Steely Dan - Can't Buy a Thrill

Built around the songwriting partnership of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Steely Dan - and specifically Can't Buy a Thrill - was remarkably fully-formed and sonically ambitious. Fagen and Becker met at Bard College in New York and developed a songwriting partnership shaped by their shared interest in jazz, unusual chord progressions and darkly comic storytelling. After moving to Los Angeles, they found work with ABC/Dunhill Records, where producer Gary Katz encouraged them to form a band to record their own material. Steely Dan emerged in 1972, with a line-up that brought together experienced musicians around the pair's compositions.

Although opening track ‘Do It Again’ is in some ways an outlier of the rest of the album, with its driving Latin rock vibes, it also illustrates the album’s key tropes; dense and rich arrangements, jazz chord structures and changes, dizzying vocal harmonies and sonic perfectionism. From the album’s first moments, Steely Dan’s musical precision is already unmistakable.

The production and the arrangements are extraordinary, as are the performances (shout out to session musician Elliott Randall’s giddying guitar solos on Reelin’ in the Years), but the dazzle and meticulousness often obscure what brilliant writing features across the album. Aside from the landmark singles of Do It Again and Reelin’ in the Years, there are half a dozen absolute AM radio staples, smooth groovers like Dirty Work and Only a Fool Would Say That, all complex and sophisticated jazz-rock workouts that sound so much more straightforward than they are. Dense, full of allegory, but also so catchy.

A rare live television appearances on the NBC late-night music variety program The Midnight Special in 1973.

From the band’s inception, Steely Dan was really always more of a duo, a pair of New Yorkers with sharpness and idiosyncrasies that have latterly had them compared as the Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld of pop. There was a reluctance to perform live and over the next couple of albums - Countdown to Ecstasy (1973) and Pretzel Logic (1974) - the band would become an entirely studio-centred operation that could draw on a wider range of musicians to accomplish their ever more elaborate compositions.

Can't Buy a Thrill heralded the arrival of two formidable talents in Fagen and Becker and would prove to be a huge influence on the following decade of songwriting and production. Smooth as you like, but spend a moment really listening to what they are doing; it’s quite bonkers.