Donald Fagen

Somewhere in TV’s vast archives, believes Donald Fagen, there’s a once-in-a-lifetime shot of him looking absolutely stupefied. Fagen and longtime collaborator Walter Becker were bowled over when they were announced as the Album of the Year winner at the 2000 Grammys for their Steely Dan reunion Two Against Nature. “Walter and I were both, ummm... surprised,” says the 58-year-old over coffee in the New York offices of his label, Reprise. “And it was pretty weird. … But I think it was probably more of a career acknowledgement or something like that, because we’d never won anything.”

A flummoxed Fagen is a truly rare occurrence. Though he endured a solid decade of frustrating writer’s block in the ’80s (only occasionally penning a film-related article for Premiere), the singer/keyboardist has been relatively busy ever since, keeping Steely Dan going with two more albums (Everything Must Go, Alive In America) and an upcoming autumn tour, and maintaining a solo career, too, with Kamakiriad in ’93 and its just-released followup, Morph The Cat. The erudite, sharp-witted Fagen says he intended his personal output as a trilogy: “The Nightfly was the point of view of a younger adolescent, Kamakiriad was about midlife, so I figured ‘Well, I should do one more about the endings of life.’ I wanted to complete that cycle, and I did that—I got it right.”

Fagen—a huge science-fiction fan—relies on surreal metaphors in the slinky, mildly sinister title track, concerning a giant ghostlike feline, floating zeppelin-like above Manhattan, bestowing a suspect peace on the populace. The sax-buttressed ballad “The Great Pagoda Of Funn” rhapsodizes on Fagen’s marriage to songwriter Libby Titus; The Aja-quiescent jam “Brite Nitegown” gavottes with the Grim Reaper (Fagen was shaken by the death of his mother in ’03); and the harmonica-prodded sidewinder “What I Do” is a staunch reaf?rmation of career faith. Fagen’s vocals remain the centerpiece, and are as ice-blue as ever.

Morph itself is an allusion to something far less innocuous, Fagen says. “The cat represents whatever’s numbed the brain for the past 40 years—it’s produced a brain death in people and really stolen reality from the world. He’s an old reality thief, but he makes everybody feel good.”

It’s only recently that Fagen says he’s felt entitled to have fun playing music. When did he fall into this mindset? “Well, it wasn’t when I got a Grammy or anything like that,” he shrugs. “But I think it’s something that happens gradually over the years, and it has to do with when you feel that your cumulative work has this kind of rightness about it. Finally, you can say ‘Well, yeah—that sounds the way I intended it to sound.’ So after all these records, now when I make music it actually comes out the way I wanted it to. I have the skill now to do it.”