How AI is ruining (and reviving) Steely Dan
From Donald Fagen voice clones to the quixotic quest to finish "The Second Arrangement," artificial intelligence now permeates the Daniverse.
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
—Donald Fagen, “I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)”
As Steely Dan prepared for their American tour in early 1974, they faced a critical decision: Who would sing the songs? Donald Fagen, ever the reluctant frontman, was happy to cede the spotlight to the group’s newest member, a 22-year-old keyboardist named Michael McDonald whose prowess as a background vocalist had wowed the band during his initial rehearsal.
“There was a serious discussion about whether he should replace me as the lead singer, which would have been my personal preference,” Fagen said last May, in a New York Times story about McDonald’s memoir. “But, for some dumb reason, I was voted down. I didn’t insist, and I’ve regretted it ever since.”
The mere whiff of a potential rift in the Daniverse’s space-time continuum has given fans plenty of food for thought. How different, one wonders, would the Steely Dan story have been had they chosen to go forth with McDonald’s soul-man yodel in place of Fagen’s nasal drawl? Would the group have continued touring instead of fully retreating into the studio? Perhaps most importantly: What might the Becker-Fagen songbook sound like with Mike’s velvety vox front and center?
A year ago I came across a song that appeared to offer an answer to the last question. A member of the Dan Fans community on the social media platform Discord had posted a track described in the chat thread as McDonald performing the lead vocal on “Black Cow,” the first cut from Aja. I downloaded the MP3 (file name: “Black McCow”) and pressed play. Sure enough, there was the Yacht Father singing about seeing you at Rudy’s, and you were very high. But something sounded off about McDonald’s singing. At the end of his phrases, I detected a ghostly flutter that did not seem totally human.
Soon I realized that what I was listening to was not a newly unearthed Steely Dan studio outtake. It was a fiction concocted with the help of artificial intelligence.