The Caves of Altamira: Innocence Lost in Prehistoric Pigment
How Steely Dan turned a Spanish cave painting into a meditation on wonder, disillusionment, and the unbridgeable distance between ancient art and modern consciousness.
• Matt Dennis
Sign in Stranger: Identity for Sale in a Noir Spaceport
How Steely Dan created a sci-fi noir masterpiece on The Royal Scam, a song about reinvention, erasure, and the marketplace where you can buy a brand new name.
• Matt Dennis
The Royal Scam: The American Dream with Monsters on the Roof
How the title track of Steely Dan's fifth album closes the record with a six-and-a-half-minute epic about immigrant disillusionment, urban predation, and the most hideous album cover of the seventies.
• Matt Dennis