LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Steely Dan: Walter Becker
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Other than the incidental compilation album, and collaboration between Becker and Fagen in the 80's, there were no real Steely Dan projects until the New York Rock & Soul Revue project. During one of these performances, Becker was present, and was called on stage by Fagen to play along some of their songs. They enjoyed playing live so much that it resulted in a tour, and a live album (Alive in America, 1995). They toured again in 1996 and even played some new songs that they were working on e.g."Jack of Speed." This created an enormous anticipation for the release of a new studio album (Two Against Nature), that was released in the spring of 2000, followed by a Japanese, US and European tour.
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After a 20-year layoff, Steely Dan returned in 2000 with TWO AGAINST NATURE. In the face of that double-decade layoff, the three-year wait for EVERYTHING MUST GO seems like a drop in the bucket. Like its predecessor, EVERYTHING harkens back to the classic '70s Dan jazzy pop sound, with some minor adjustments. The bluesy Walter Becker guitar leads that were a key element of TWO AGAINST NATURE are even more prevalent here (Becker even takes a lead vocal this time around), and the earlier album's harmonically simpler song structures and arrangements are pared down a bit further here.
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Steely Dan is a Grammy-Award winning American jazz fusion band centered on core members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The band's peak of popularity was in the 1970s, when it released six albums that blended elements of jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and pop. Their music is characterized by complex jazz-influenced structures and harmonies, literate and sometimes obscure or ambiguous lyrics filled with dark sarcasm, and their adroit musicianship and studio perfectionism.
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Fagen said in a recent New York Times interview that he regards all Steely Dan albums as "comedy records to some degree," and of course he's right. Fagen and Becker are not Lou Reed; they have no urge to wallow in the miasma. Take the album's finale, the title song, which, after a long, wistful, party's-over tenor-sax solo, begins: "It's high time for a walk on the real side/ Let's admit the bastards beat us/ I move to dissolve the corporation/ in a pool of margaritas/ So let's switch off all the lights/ and light up the Luckies/ crankin' up the afterglow …"
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Linda speaks with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, of the rock band Steely Dan, about their first new album since 1979: "Two Against Nature." They discuss why they took such a long break, and talk about their website, www.steelydan.com.
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The mu major chord is usually played on the piano in Steely Dan albums, but ... on the guitar, although these chords are much harder to play on the guitar then on the piano. In the words of Walter Becker:
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Walter Becker