If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have been paid more than a few compliments.
Before he passed away last year, the musician Barney Hurley and I enjoyed sending each other Steely Dan soundalikes. These weren’t songs that were consciously copping a Dan-esque vibe, like Billy Joel’s “Zanzibar,” nor were they affectionate homages along the lines of Ween’s “Pandy Fackler.” These were, as Hurley put it when defining the terms of our little parlor game, “tracks that are impersonating Steely Dan, downright plagiarizing them.”
For a song to make the cut, it had to blatantly borrow a melodic or rhythmic motif from a Becker-Fagen composition (solo albums included). Unsurprisingly, many of these rip-offs came from artists in the Japanese jazz-rock subgenre city pop, who are known for their preoccupation with Steely Dan. Others came from library music catalogs and dark corners of the audiophile internet. Hurley had a truffle hound’s sense for locating these buried treasures that was astounding. For every song I would email to him, he would fill my inbox with them in return.
For this mixtape I’ve compiled some of my favorite secondhand Dan from the 1970s to as recent as 2019. It’s by no means an exhaustive collection; I may send out another batch or two in future newsletters.
Though some listeners may turn up their noses at the unoriginality inherent in these songs, not to mention the IP theft, it seems only fair that artists over the years have cribbed from the Dan catalog. Becker and Fagen themselves were known to lift without explicit attribution, whether it be Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” for “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” or Keith Jarrett’s “‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours” for “Gaucho.”
“We steal,” Fagen bluntly told Musician’s David Breskin in 1980. “We’re the robber barons of rock ’n’ roll, you know.”
Think of it as the karmic wheel turnin' ’round and ’round.
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