The Goodbye Look: Suburban Spies and Chandler Dreams
Raymond Chandler meets Cold War paranoia in a song about the spy fantasies of childhood, where every neighbor might be an agent and every glance carries hidden meaning.
• Matt Dennis
Green Flower Street: Noir Jazz in the Forbidden Quarter
A teenage fantasy of Chinatown danger and jazz sophistication, where Larry Carlton's guitar leads the listener through alleys that never existed outside the imagination.
• Matt Dennis
I.G.Y.: The Future That Never Arrived
The opening track of The Nightfly promises a tomorrow of spandex jackets and undersea rail, delivered with the bittersweet knowledge that 1982 knows how the story ends.
• Matt Dennis
Maxine: The Girl Across the Boundary Lines
A quiet ballad about suburban class anxiety and teenage longing, where the distance between two houses contains an entire social universe.
• Matt Dennis
New Frontier: Making Out at the End of the World
The fallout shelter becomes a teenage party venue in the most mordantly funny song about nuclear anxiety ever recorded, where apocalypse is just another backdrop for adolescence.
• Matt Dennis
The Nightfly: Lester's Lonely Broadcast
The title track introduces Lester the Nightfly, a late-night DJ spinning jazz for insomniacs and outcasts—a portrait of solitary devotion that might be autobiography.
• Matt Dennis
Ruby Baby: Doo-Wop Through the Jazz Lens
The only cover on The Nightfly transforms a Leiber & Stoller classic into something stranger—the past reimagined by someone who lived through it differently.
• Matt Dennis
Walk Between Raindrops: The Innocent Finale
The shortest and sweetest track on The Nightfly closes the album with pure joy—a moment of grace before the 1960s arrive and everything changes.
• Matt Dennis
Aja: The Eight-Minute Monument to Jazz-Rock Fusion
Unpacking the mythology and reality of the title track: Steve Gadd's legendary drums, Wayne Shorter's soprano sax, and the surgical editing that made perfection possible.
• Matt Dennis
Black Cow: The Opening Statement of Immaculate Confrontation
How the first track of Aja establishes the sonic template for perfection: Victor Feldman's Rhodes, Bernard Purdie's pocket, and a narrator who's had enough.
• Matt Dennis
The Caves of Altamira: Innocence Lost in Prehistoric Pigment
How Steely Dan turned a Spanish cave painting into a meditation on wonder, disillusionment, and the unbridgeable distance between ancient art and modern consciousness.
• Matt Dennis
Deacon Blues: The Romantic Philosophy of Chosen Failure
Why wanting to be a loser is the most subversive statement on Aja, featuring Pete Christlieb's iconic tenor sax and the art of dignified surrender.
• Matt Dennis
Don't Take Me Alive: The Siege as Rock Anthem
How Steely Dan built a tense, guitar-driven standoff narrative on The Royal Scam, featuring Larry Carlton's most aggressive performance and a lyric that turns urban violence into existential theater.
• Matt Dennis
Everything You Did: Turn Up the Eagles, the Neighbors Are Listening
How a domestic argument became the vehicle for rock's most famous inter-band reference, and how the Eagles answered back with steely knives in Hotel California.
• Matt Dennis
Green Earrings: The Blues Lurking Inside the Machine
How a cryptic lyric about obsession and possession meets one of The Royal Scam's most aggressive guitar-driven arrangements, revealing the blues DNA beneath Steely Dan's sophistication.
• Matt Dennis
Haitian Divorce: Voodoo, Talk Box, and the Dissolution of the American Marriage
How Steely Dan built the strangest track on The Royal Scam around Dean Parks' talk box guitar, a Caribbean narrative of marital collapse, and a groove that became their biggest UK hit.
• Matt Dennis
Home at Last: The Purdie Shuffle and Homeric Wandering
How Bernard Purdie's legendary groove meets Odyssean longing in Steely Dan's meditation on restless return—a song about arrival that never quite settles.
• Matt Dennis
I Got the News: The Tightest Pop on the Most Expensive Album
How Steely Dan's shortest and most conventional song on Aja demonstrates that perfectionism serves groove as much as grandeur.
• Matt Dennis
Josie: The Celebration That Closes the Journey
How Steely Dan's uptempo finale transforms the album's perfectionism into pure joy—featuring Chuck Rainey's irrepressible bass and the art of the triumphant exit.
• Matt Dennis
Kid Charlemagne: The Last Acid King Gets a Guitar Solo for the Ages
How the opening track of The Royal Scam delivers Larry Carlton's most iconic guitar work, Jeff Porcaro's propulsive drumming, and a eulogy for the counterculture wrapped in immaculate pop-rock.
• Matt Dennis
Peg: Seven Guitarists and the Quest for the Perfect Solo
The legendary story of how Jay Graydon succeeded where six others failed, and why twenty seconds of guitar became the ultimate symbol of Steely Dan's perfectionism.
• Matt Dennis
Sign in Stranger: Identity for Sale in a Noir Spaceport
How Steely Dan created a sci-fi noir masterpiece on The Royal Scam, a song about reinvention, erasure, and the marketplace where you can buy a brand new name.
• Matt Dennis
The Fez: The Groove That Somebody Else Started
How a keyboard riff from Paul Griffin became one of Steely Dan's rare co-writing credits, and how a song about insistence became the most relentless groove on The Royal Scam.
• Matt Dennis
The Royal Scam: The American Dream with Monsters on the Roof
How the title track of Steely Dan's fifth album closes the record with a six-and-a-half-minute epic about immigrant disillusionment, urban predation, and the most hideous album cover of the seventies.
• Matt Dennis
Babylon Sisters: The Purdie Shuffle in the Age of Digital Rigor
How the opening track of Gaucho signals the end of the 70s party, featuring a mechanically perfected Purdie Shuffle and the cold dawn of the digital era.
• Matt Dennis
Glamour Profession: The Disco-Funk of High-End Paranoia
Seven minutes of relentless groove, basketball stars, and illicit transactions. How Glamour Profession captures the dark, cocaine-fueled heart of 1980s Los Angeles.
• Matt Dennis
Hey Nineteen: The Architecture of the Mid-Life Crisis
Behind the smooth Rhodes and the Cuervo Gold lies a brutal examination of aging, irrelevance, and the digital perfection that masks the decay.
• Matt Dennis
My Rival: Petty Jealousy in High Fidelity
Why Steely Dan used a cheap Farfisa organ to anchor a million-dollar production, and how the song captures the essence of paranoid, petty obsession.
• Matt Dennis