DU3 Album of the Day: "Aja" Steely Dan [View all]

[gratuitous]

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want to name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blue

Autumn 1977: An impossibly young gratuitous comes back from summer break and finds his roommate sampling cuts from a new album. There are only seven songs, so it doesn't take long. "That sounds pretty good," offers gratuitous. "You like that?" his roommate responds. "The whole album sounds like that."

Back in the olden days before the internet and the relentless disclosure of every fact and facet of entertainment lives and developments, a new album might be released without so much as a full-page ad. "Aja," the new Steely Dan album for summer 1977 had been rumored in the works for months. A stray comment here in Rolling Stone, a mention in Cream of a studio musician doing a track, and that's about all a fan had to work with.

"Aja" is probably the perfectionist pinnacle of the legendarily perfectionist musical marriage of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Working with session musicians and producer Gary Katz, Steely Dan put out an album for the ages.

Black Cow
Aja
Deacon Blues
Peg
Home at Last
I Got the News
Josie