Reprinted from EQ Magazine
Women often accuse their husbands of having no idea what it is like to get pregnant and to give birth. They also talk about the fact that after the birth, nature somehow makes them forget about all the pain and discomfort so that they will want to become pregnant and give birth again. Well, I beg to differ with this point of view. Those women never recorded a Steely Dan album. Nine of more months of gestation followed by intense labor (mixing) and finally the birth of each album. A short time period would elapse and we would be ready to jump right into the next one.
I just got back from a month working on the beginning of a new Donald Fagen album that Walter Becker is producing. It's been eight years since the last Donald Fagen album, and I guess I forgot about the surgical precision with which Donald approaches his tunes. Squeezing 110 percent out of the machines and musicians like water squeezed from a stone.
Well, Chris Parker came in to play the drums. We recorded about a zillion passes of Chris playing along with a sequencer. After Chris was safely on a plane back to New York, we took his drum track apart piece by piece. Mind you, the performance wasn't bad, he was just half a millisecond late here, a millisecond early there, you know, the usual stuff. What he played on the intro, bridges and fade were actually kept intact. All we really manufactured were the verses. We took a piece of hi hat pattern from one verse, some cymbal crashes from somewhere else, a bunch of snare hits from all over the place, and put them all together in a sequence and made them match the drum machine pattern.
Well, we got part of one track done (drums and real Rhodes played by Donald). Maybe by March, when we ge back in to do some more, I will forget how painful the increments were. The birth of a new Donald Fagen album will be worth the effort, I just wish we could keep the gestation period down to something a little more manageable. These albums have been known for pushing the outer limits of the envelope. By the time this album comes out, it may be about 5 milliseconds ahead of its time.
Besides the Donald Fagen project, I have been working with Walter Becker on a few other albums during the last year. In the same amount of time that it took to record drums and piano on two tunes for Donald, we recorded ten hours of music on 11 albums -- and half of them are already in the stores. The two experiences are really the flip sides of a coin.
The musician list on the Walter Becker project has been a veritable who's who: John Patatuci, Peter Erskine, John Beasley, Bob Sheppard, Dean Parks, Dave Weckle Jackie McLean and many, many more. What a pleasure it has been. These were jazz albums for Windham Hill and Triloka records. It is a lot of fun to go into the studio, record a whole album in two days, mix on the third day and then call it done. Most of the albums contained about 60 minutes worth of music. Mixing was at the rate of ten tunes per day as opposed to ten days per tune.