A question: What exactly is a blues ballad? Can anyone out there help me with this? I first heard the term some years ago during the terrific video that Donald Fagen did about the influence of blues on his songwriting, when he compared his use of major seven chords in a blues form to "blues ballads done by Bobby 'Blue' Bland". I'll have to find the video (that's right - I have it on VHS) before I can double-check the accuracy of the quotation I just gave or provide the correct title of the video, but I think that was the gist of it. And the Wikipedia entry was OK, but not entirely convincing. However it did hip me to an amazing Fats Domino song that I hadn't heard before, called "Every Night About This Time", which you have to check out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpJmHldX0s).

And the quandary also got me thinking about other possible examples, such as the hugely under-appreciated Stones tune, "I Got the Blues" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgF-PRY96Is&playnext=1&list=PLFCC93639C9A06912). The song is also a good example of what happens when Jagger and Richards really get down to working together. Here's hoping they do it again soon.

In writing about Donald Fagen's tribute to Ray Charles ("What I Do" from his 2006 album, Morph the Cat), I said that irony is his primary mode, and I stand by the statement (although "default position" might've been more accurate), but it got me thinking of the important tradition of irony in American art. Perhaps its source is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has been in the news again lately, and it's partially for this reason that Hemingway said that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn", in his famous pronouncement. The controversies, seemingly never-ending, surrounding the book are due to the language, and while the appropriateness of such language in our time is fair to debate, I don't think that it makes sense to question Twain's intentions. They're obvious. As he put it, the novel "is a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and the conscience suffers defeat". Put more bluntly, during the story, Huck comes to realize that everything he'd learned was wrong, and he was willing to stand to it, come what may.

OK, what does all of this have to do with music? Well, another great American artist, Randy Newman, has been trying to achieve similar goals in a similar way for many years. And he too has been at the center of a few firestorms - the one about "Short People" was a good one, for example. And his 1974 album, Good Old Boys, one of his finest and most complex, is a masterpiece, like Twain's, with a sound heart and good intentions. Here's "Louisiana 1927" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGs2iLoDUYE) about another episode in the history of the Mississippi.

Jackie Mason once said, in answering a question regarding why his comedy is "mean", that "compliments aren't funny". This helps to explain why it's been said that what comedians fear the most is sincerity. And although I wouldn't classify the tone of Donald Fagen's lyrics as comical or anything like that, I would say that irony is his primary mode. Therefore, finding a song such as "What I Do" on one of his albums (Morph the Cat, from 2006) was a real surprise, because the song is basically a straight-ahead tribute to Ray Charles (in the liner notes, Fagen calls it a "conversation between some younger version of myself and the ghost of Ray Charles"). One of the really cool things about both Fagen and Becker, as their fans know, is the way they are constantly paying tribute to the great musicians who have inspired them in the past - and the ones who do so in the present too, for that matter. But recording this song must have been a bit nerve-wracking, even for an artist of his caliber, because he had two significant problems to surmount: the aforementioned tone issue, and the fact that the music would have to be worthy of one of his heroes. Have a listen to the song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQdu6ju1fBw) and a look at the lyrics (http://donaldfagen.com/disc_morphthecat.php) and see if you think that he accomplished both. I know I do.

Steely Dan's Walter Becker is best known for his compositional skills. He has worked in tandem with Donald Fagen for over forty years in what would have to be considered one of the very greatest of songwriting teams. And just as Fagen has released sparkling solo albums (three, actually), so has Becker (with two). The first of the two albums has not received as much attention as it deserved, in my opinion, so I'll be writing about it today.

11 Tracks of Whack (1994), co-produced with Fagen, is one of my favourite records. The opening track (of twelve, despite the title), "Down in the Bottom", sets the mood and the subject matter for the rest of the record: the attempted suburban escape of drug addicts and others bearing emotional scars from earlier, faster lives. It features a powerful vocal performance by Becker, who is hugely under-rated as a vocalist. The strength of his singing comes from his deep musical experience rather than his timbre, so it requires thoughtful listening to fully appreciate - he's a bit like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy in that respect, in fact - and this song is a good place to do it: the melody is beautifully contoured and he lays it out perfectly. Becker's guitar skills are on display here as well, and they're prodigious; he's equally at home in jazz and blues, and he crosses from one to the other freely, often in the same line. The album is filled with great playing, singing, grooves, melodies and lyrics. You should hear it. Here's an interesting track ("Medical Science") that's available only on the Japanese release: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhh2IKdd5I

Steely Dan's story is an amazing one. The band, essentially the songwriting duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, began working together after meeting in 1967 at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. They were English majors. The amazing part is that their musical career, which rivals the most important composers and/or recording artists in popular music history in terms of variety, depth and sophistication (their peers are people like Duke Ellington) was really a creation in large part of their literary backgrounds - or at least would not have been possible without their literary backgrounds.
First, to approach their songs properly, one must recognize that they are essentially short stories (or narrative poems, if you prefer). As a matter of fact, it could be argued that they are as accurate as anything in recent fiction in terms of describing modern sensibilities.
Second, over the course of the nine Steely Dan studio albums, and the five solo albums (three by Fagen, two by Becker), their lyrics have developed at the same rate as their musicianship and recording studio knowledge. In fact, the music may have developed partially as a result of the lyrical growth. (Try to imagine the story told in "Black Cow", for example, without its musical setting.)
Their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill (the title is a line from Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry") is the best place to begin, and we'll do that tomorrow. Listening: two tracks that didn't make it onto Can't Buy a Thrill - "Sail the Waterway" and "Dallas" - available on YouTube (cf. "Black Cow").