This interview initially appeared in NPR Music’s weekly publication. Subscribe to the publication right here.

Steely Dan is a paradox. As author Alex Pappademas places it, it is a “cult band whose catalog … consists of not less than a dozen enduring radio hits” — two guys who frequently discovered a approach to “embed blue-ribbon misanthropy in music designed to go down as clean as creme de menthe.” And like many nice paradoxes, there’s extra to study concerning the band the longer you spend contemplating it. That is true even for those who solely know a number of of these enduring hits. You may acknowledge the refrain of “Soiled Work,” for instance — however do you know that the person singing lead vocals on that monitor, David Palmer, as soon as performed a highschool present alongside The Velvet Underground — its first beneath that identify? Do you know that “Rikki Do not Lose That Quantity” was written for the spouse of a college member at Bard Faculty, the place Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen studied? Or that one in every of MF Doom’s earliest solo tracks samples the opening track on Aja?

Within the new guide Quantum Criminals, Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay give a roadmap to the Steely Dan prolonged universe by the lens of the characters on the coronary heart of the band’s songs. Alongside Pappademas’ explorations, LeMay’s work render touching portraits of Steely Dan’s influences and inheritors, and speculative illustrations of the personalities who populate its world. Their guide uncovers the huge constellation of lyrical references, inventive influences and social and political contexts surrounding the band and its music. On this interview, Pappademas and LeMay answered a number of questions on their private histories with Steely Dan and the way Quantum Criminals got here to be.

This interview has been edited for size and readability.

Marissa Lorusso: In one of many guide’s opening chapters, Alex particulars his evolving relationship with Steely Dan’s music, from delicate distaste to considerably ironic engagement to honest appreciation — a path he says has been adopted by many Millennial and Gen Z followers. Joan, what is the story of your relationship with Steely Dan — did your fandom comply with an identical highway?

Joan LeMay: Listening to Steely Dan is, sincere to God, my first musical reminiscence. Rising up, my mother and father had a really restricted document assortment — a stack about 5 inches huge or so. In it was your entire Steely Dan discography (later to incorporate [Donald Fagen’s solo debut] The Nightfly; no different Fagen solo data nor any Becker data made the lower), plus a number of Linda Ronstadt, a few James Taylor data, The Better of the Doobie Brothers Vol. II, Carole King’s Tapestry and Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick. At 2 years outdated, I used to be what one would name a tall child. I might attain for issues. And I might get ’em, too. I clearly keep in mind the day I used to be capable of attain the turntable, my tiny arms at full stretch above my head, and heft an LP upon it till the peg snapped into the opening. That LP was Cannot Purchase A Thrill. I favored it essentially the most out of all of my mother and father’ data due to the colours on the quilt. I plopped down on our diarrhea-brown shag carpet and was happy. It appears unlikely that I might keep in mind this so clearly, however I used to be studying the newspaper at that age — I peaked early.

How did you resolve to strategy a guide about Steely Dan this fashion? Why inform the story of the band by the lens of those characters — and what impressed each of you to strategy this mission as an illustrated/written collaboration?

LeMay: In 2020, I acquired again into the follow of creating fanzines. I made two problems with a zine referred to as Mug Membership — I requested individuals within the arts to ship me a photograph of their favourite mug and inform me a narrative about it, and I might paint the mug. The work and tales had been a approach to explode the banal/micro into the elegant/macro and function a connective artistic mission within the midst of lockdown. After these, I began making a fanzine referred to as Danzine whereby I deliberate to color all 240-something characters within the Steely Dan universe. I acquired so far as drawing the quilt, making a personality spreadsheet, doing a number of sketches and posting about it on Instagram, partially as a approach to preserve myself accountable for making the factor.

Esteemed author/director Jessica Hopper, one of many editors of the College of Texas Press American Music Collection and this guide’s doula, texted me and mentioned “Joanie? That is not a fanzine. That is a guide.” Earlier than I posted my factor, she had been speaking with Alex about what sort of guide he may like to put in writing for the press and he’d responded by pitching a guide that was “Bluets, however Steely Dan” … and she or he put us collectively.

Alex Pappademas: Bluets is a group of brief items by the unimaginable poet and nonfiction author Maggie Nelson that stroll the road between autobiography and criticism and prose poetry. I had been studying plenty of Nelson and different nonfiction writers who work in a extremely pared-down, aphoristic mode and when Jessica and I began speaking about me doing a Steely Dan guide for UT, I mentioned I needed to do one thing actually piece-y and fragmentary like that. I do not know that there was any particular Steely Dan-related cause I needed to do it that method; I simply favored the thought of writing these micro-essays the place every one can be its personal considered Steely Dan and their music and their place in popular culture/American tradition, and themes would construct and accumulate the way in which they do in Nelson’s work, or Jenny Offill’s or a few of David Shields’s stuff. By the point Jessica roped Joan into this mission, I had a top level view for what would have been a Bluets model of this guide, however plenty of it was fairly sketchy — like, “Chevy Chase” can be a line merchandise on the define, or “Dan and Race” or “Perfectionism.” I mulched on this for simply over a 12 months, on and off, earlier than Joan even engaged. After which we did not get to the proposal till September 2020 — deep COVID instances. Ebook was achieved nearly precisely one 12 months from that date, however I might say a lot of the writing took about seven months.

As soon as we merged the thought for Bluets-but-Steely Dan with Joan’s thought to color all of the characters, it necessitated a change in my strategy; as a substitute of creating a deck of playing cards and attempting to assemble them right into a narrative it was about seeing how a lot you might dangle on the thought of a person Steely Dan character and how one can use these characters to border tales that illuminated Steely Dan’s legacy in some fascinating method.

The chapters on this guide give such deep research of the personalities who populate Steely Dan’s songs (and, by extension, of the musicians who introduced them to life). Did your relationship with any of those songs change whereas writing about them, illustrating them, or in any other case getting contained in the heads of those characters? Did you study something concerning the songs that genuinely shocked you whereas engaged on this mission?

LeMay: I discovered a lot. On our weekly calls, Alex at all times excitedly ushered me into the doorway of a number of wormholes he’d been traversing, and it was a continuing delight. Pondering deeply about what these characters had been carrying, what they could’ve been doing within the narrative past the narrative, fascinated about their surroundings, how they held their faces, how they held their our bodies — it was an immersive approach to pay attention. I might had concepts in my head about so lots of the characters as a result of I are inclined to suppose visually, however there have been a number of implausible surprises, like once we dug into Cathy Berberian, as an example. I might by no means appeared up what she appeared like earlier than.

Pappademas: I believe what shocked me essentially the most as I dug deeper into these songs was how a lot empathy Donald and Walter appeared to have for his or her characters. It isn’t one thing they’re normally given credit score for — the thought individuals have about them is that they are at all times snickering amongst themselves, making enjoyable of the individuals they write about, however I believe that is really extra true of anyone like Randy Newman than it’s of Becker/Fagen. I believe there’s at all times an actual sense of humanity’s plight beneath no matter coldness or archness is extra simply detectable of their work on first blush — even when the individuals they’re writing about are doomed or deluded or wicked, you do not get the sense that they are judging these characters, more often than not. There’s an consideration paid to the human longing that motivates individuals to those bizarre actions and so they do not decide the longing, of, say, the man who’s hung up on a intercourse employee in “Pearl of the Quarter” — whereas Frank Zappa, given the identical storyline, would completely write about what a moron that man is.

Steely Dan’s lyrics are famously considerably cryptic, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had been fairly averse to having their lyrics learn as easy private narratives. It is clear that a lot analysis went into illuminating these songs, however there’s additionally a wholesome dose of artistic hypothesis, too, each in how the topics of the songs are described and the way they’re depicted.

LeMay: The one characters I painted that weren’t 100% artistic hypothesis (and actually, much less hypothesis and extra my private interpretation) had been these having to do with precise, residing individuals, like Cathy Berberian, Jill St. John and G. Gordon Liddy. I had a folder on my laptop referred to as “DAN CASTING GALLERY” filled with photos of individuals in my life, discovered photographs, ’60s and ’70s trend catalogs, ads and stitching sample packaging. I painted from a melange of these photos combined with issues that had been in my head eternally, in addition to from a ton of photographs of my very own physique posing in several methods for reference. Crucial factor to me was getting the humanity — the profoundly flawed humanity — of those characters proper.

Pappademas: And it really works — I attempt to get throughout that humanity within the textual content, however having Joan populate this world with actual human faces made the completed product into one thing better than I may have gotten to alone.

Anyway, my reply to the query above is that once I’m writing criticism, for positive, but in addition once I’m writing reported items, I really feel like there’s at all times a component of artistic hypothesis in what I do. It is simply roughly constrained by information relying on what sort of piece it’s. Even for those who’ve sat in a room with anyone for hours you are in the end imagining their inside life based mostly on what they’ve informed you, and typically on what they have not informed you. By way of Quantum Criminals, yeah, Steely Dan undoubtedly tried to discourage any try to learn these lyrics autobiographically — and the truth that all their lyrics had been composed by (or not less than credited to) two writers was their first line of protection in opposition to that type of studying, as a result of even after they’re writing within the first particular person you are acutely aware that the “I” in each Dan track is to no matter diploma a fictional character and subsequently a distancing gadget. However I believe it is human nature — or not less than it is my human nature — to intuit the alternative and search for locations the place the artwork appears to correspond to what we all know to be the contours of an artist’s life. As a result of the opposite factor about Steely Dan is that they favored to obfuscate; the truth that they not often owned as much as their music having an autobiographical part (with sure exceptions, notably “Deacon Blues,” which they admitted was fairly private) doesn’t suggest it wasn’t autobiographical. And at instances — as with “Gaucho,” a track a couple of duo torn aside by a 3rd celebration who is perhaps the personification of medication or different types of hedonism, recorded for the album Donald made principally with out Walter as a result of Walter’s habit points had pulled him away from the band — the correspondences turned too tempting to not discover. Which is what occurs while you write cryptically; it is human nature to decrypt.

I do not know; I suppose I am doing the identical factor Taylor Swift’s followers do after they resolve that some opaque lyric is an Easter egg about this or that relationship of hers, or what A.J. Weberman was doing when he determined “The solar is not yellow, it is hen” was Bob Dylan confessing to faking his personal demise, or what the individuals who suppose The Shining was Stanley Kubrick exorcizing his guilt over faking the moon touchdown. The distinction is that I believe I am proper and I believe these different persons are all nuts, as a result of I am in my bubble and might’t think about the view from theirs.

Lastly, what do you hope readers — be they longtime devotees, newly transformed followers or Steely Dan skeptics — take away from Quantum Criminals?

LeMay: I believe that in plenty of methods, this guide may be learn as one thing that is concerning the ridiculous cacophony of what it’s to be an individual on the planet, striving to do one thing you are pleased with. In plenty of different methods, it’s a actual invitation to really dive into what you like with reckless abandon — to dream about it onerous, to see and listen to and respect the small particulars and the large methods you are feeling on account of giving your self the present of paying consideration. I hope that readers come away from the guide fascinated about all of the methods they’ve but to take pleasure in not simply Steely Dan, however something that strikes them.

Pappademas: I hope individuals come away from this guide fascinated about how, despite the fact that perfectionism can undo you as an artist and any guide about how one can make your artwork will let you know that again and again, there’s nonetheless one thing noble and helpful about aspiring to perfection — that there is magic within the falling-short but in addition within the reaching-for. I additionally hope these tales encourage younger individuals to say no to medication.