Green Earrings: The Blues Lurking Inside the Machine
How a cryptic lyric about obsession and possession meets one of The Royal Scam's most aggressive guitar-driven arrangements, revealing the blues DNA beneath Steely Dan's sophistication.
“Green Earrings” is The Royal Scam at its most primal. Beneath the immaculate production, beneath the jazz-trained musicians and the carefully orchestrated arrangement, there is a blues song trying to claw its way out. The guitar riff that drives the track has a rawness that would sound at home on a Chess Records session, yet it operates within a harmonic framework that no blues purist would recognize.
This tension—between the visceral and the cerebral, between the gut and the conservatory—is where Steely Dan found their best material.
The Riff as Engine
The guitar riff that opens “Green Earrings” is blunt, repetitive, and insistent. It anchors the track with a rhythmic figure that loops and drives, creating forward momentum through sheer force of repetition. This is not the fluid, melodic guitar work of “Kid Charlemagne.” This is a riff designed to move bodies, not impress musicians.
The tone is thick and slightly overdriven, sitting in the lower midrange with a weight that the track’s other elements stack upon. It functions less as a melody and more as a rhythmic instrument, locking in with the drums and bass to create a unified propulsive force.
When the guitar breaks free during the solo sections, the playing becomes more aggressive, bending notes with an urgency that suggests the player is channeling something beyond technical facility. The solo doesn’t resolve neatly; it pushes and scrapes and then returns to the riff, as if the song itself is pulling the guitar back into line.
The Lyric as Obsession
“Green Earrings” is one of the more opaque lyrics on an album full of opacity. The title image—green earrings—recurs throughout the song as a fixation, an object of desire that stands in for something larger and less defined. The narrator is consumed by something or someone, and the earrings serve as the visible symbol of an invisible compulsion.
Becker and Fagen’s lyrical method here is closer to poetry than narrative. There is no clear story, no identifiable characters beyond the narrator and the object of obsession. Instead, the song builds meaning through accumulation of images: the earrings, the desire, the inability to look away.
Fagen’s vocal delivery is taut and slightly strained, as though the act of singing about this fixation is itself uncomfortable. The voice sits close in the mix, intimate and confrontational, demanding the listener’s attention with the same insistence that the lyric’s narrator directs at the earrings.
The Rhythmic Assault
The drum performance on “Green Earrings” is among the most physically assertive on the album. The kick drum hits hard and dry, the snare cracks with authority, and the hi-hat drives with a sixteenth-note pattern that keeps the track tightly wound. There is no swing here, no jazz looseness. This is rock drumming in service of a blues impulse, channeled through Steely Dan’s obsessive production values.
The bass follows the guitar riff closely, doubling its rhythmic pattern while adding harmonic depth beneath it. The result is a bottom end that feels monolithic—a single, unified force that the keyboards and vocal ride atop like a wave.
The arrangement builds through the song’s duration, adding layers without changing the fundamental pattern. Horns enter to punctuate key moments, their stabs adding brightness to the track’s otherwise dark palette. The cumulative effect is of intensity that increases without ever breaking character.
Blues Beneath the Surface
Steely Dan’s relationship to the blues was complicated. Becker and Fagen were jazz and R&B scholars who understood the blues as a foundation rather than a destination. Their music rarely sounded like blues, but the emotional architecture of the blues—the repetition, the insistence, the sublimation of pain into groove—informed nearly everything they wrote.
“Green Earrings” is the track where that foundation shows most clearly. Strip away the sophisticated chord voicings, the precision engineering of the mix, the careful layering of arrangement elements, and what remains is a man playing a riff over and over because he can’t stop thinking about something. That is the blues in its purest form.
The song doesn’t resolve its tension. It simply stops, as if the obsession that drives it has no natural endpoint. The riff will continue after the fade, somewhere, forever. On The Royal Scam, even the primitive impulses are given the Steely Dan treatment—refined, polished, and presented in a frame that makes their rawness all the more unsettling.