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
Don't Take Me Alive: The Siege as Rock Anthem
How Steely Dan built a tense, guitar-driven standoff narrative on The Royal Scam, featuring Larry Carlton's most aggressive performance and a lyric that turns urban violence into existential theater.
• Matt Dennis
Everything You Did: Turn Up the Eagles, the Neighbors Are Listening
How a domestic argument became the vehicle for rock's most famous inter-band reference, and how the Eagles answered back with steely knives in Hotel California.
• Matt Dennis
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.
• Matt Dennis
Haitian Divorce: Voodoo, Talk Box, and the Dissolution of the American Marriage
How Steely Dan built the strangest track on The Royal Scam around Dean Parks' talk box guitar, a Caribbean narrative of marital collapse, and a groove that became their biggest UK hit.
• Matt Dennis
Kid Charlemagne: The Last Acid King Gets a Guitar Solo for the Ages
How the opening track of The Royal Scam delivers Larry Carlton's most iconic guitar work, Jeff Porcaro's propulsive drumming, and a eulogy for the counterculture wrapped in immaculate pop-rock.
• 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 Fez: The Groove That Somebody Else Started
How a keyboard riff from Paul Griffin became one of Steely Dan's rare co-writing credits, and how a song about insistence became the most relentless groove on The Royal Scam.
• 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