Steely Dan
The 50 Best Albums of 1972
Last year, when helping assemble SPIN‘s 50 Best Albums of 1971, I wondered if that year could have been popular music’s absolute peak. Now I’m asking myself that same question all over again. As I built a spreadsheet for 1972, gathering our writers’ votes alongside my own weird choices, I was once again struck by how many bronze-cast classics came out that year: LPs from David Bowie, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, The Allman Brothers Band, Yes, Stevie Wonder, Roxy Music, and on and on. Run down basically every genre – glam, soul, prog, art rock, Southern rock, metal, folk, MPB — and you’ll find the very best shit, whether eternally famous or sadly obscure. (My poor spreadsheet, swelling each day, originally had hundreds of worthy records. But you have to start chopping eventually.) Here’s wher...
The 10 Best Indie and Alternative Steely Dan Covers
Once upon a time, Steely Dan were hipsters. As frontman Donald Fagen explained in his 2013 book, Eminent Hipsters, he and Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker grew up as aficionados of pre-rock ’n roll cool, studying jazz and Beat Generation writers. During the band’s original 1970s run, they were fixtures in the Village Voice critics’ polls even as their music gradually became smoother, slicker, and more popular. “We were kind of on the cusp of the counterculture and whatever happened afterwards,” Fagen told SPIN in a recent interview about the band’s new live album, Northeast Corridor. Over the past half-century, Steely Dan have been heroes and villains in equal measure — subversive iconoclasts to some, banal elevator music hacks to others. Even as they’ve played the role of establishment...
5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: David Crosby
Name David Crosby Best known for Probably harmony. I do good harmonies. Current city Central California. Really want to be in No, I really like it here [in California]. I do like Western Europe. I like England and France and Italy and Spain, particularly Italy. Excited about New album For Free (July 23). What’s exciting about it is that this is the fifth one. I’ve done five records in the last six years, which I don’t know anybody who has. Not young people or old people or anybody. Frankly, they’re good records. That’s what excites me. I love good music. I love good songs, and I think that’s what we’re doing. I think we’re presenting a bunch of really good songs. My current music collection has a lot of Probably more singer-songwriters than anything else, but there’s a lot of jazz, a lot o...
The 50 Best Songs of the Year 2000
The year 2000 looms large in pop culture history: the Y2k non-scare, the Seinfeld “Newmannium” episode, the “In the Year 2000″ sketch from Conan O’Brien’s original late-night show, the Hulu series PEN15. And just like, say, the grunge-defined 1991, the year immediately conjures specific sounds: gleaming teen-pop, earnest radio rock, the Neptunes and Timbaland. There’s never a bad time to revisit this music. But in the middle of a pandemic, with America on the verge of collapse, it feels extra comforting — a blast of nostalgia for a time when you could safely exit your home, visit your local mall’s Sam Goody and buy Mystikal’s “Shake Ya Ass” CD single. For this list, our only criteria was that the songs appear on albums or soundtracks released in 2000. Here we go. 50. Papa Roach, “Last Reso...
