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Kind of what they did to Times Square.

Yeah, sort of.

You said "H Gang" was "the birth and death of a band in a nutshell," and you made reference to "one of the most hilariously bad films of all time."

Yeah, "Song of Desire." It's about this band that has kind of a brief lifespan and then the lead singer gets married and moves to the Midwest. They make this film about it and get it all wrong, as they do with a lot of things. The way the band is remembered is through this really bad film. I think that happens a lot with history in general.

"What I Do" is a really fascinating song. I was wondering whether you ever had the chance to meet Ray Charles when he was alive.

I didn't. I was once in an elevator with his manager, Joe [Adams], though.

Other than "What I Do," I don't think I've ever heard a song where you've made any declarative statement of purpose.

Yeah -- maybe so. Although I think what appears to be Donald or Don in the song is maybe a younger version of myself. He has a conversation with the ghost of Ray Charles, and Ray gives him some advice about life and some -- uh, dating advice, I guess you'd say.

Not to say it's a copy, but it does sound structurally like a sweetened version of "What'd I Say."

The title's a play on words off "What'd I Say." It was generally influenced by any number of stop-time blues that Ray did.

I noticed the next two songs, "Brite Nightgown" and "The Great Pagoda of Funn," both had misspelled words in their titles.

Actually, I didn't notice that, but you're right. I guess there were too many "gh"'s in "bright" and "night," and they were annoying me. Since the fellow in the bright nightgown represents death, I figured I'd want to lighten it up a little bit.

It is one of the more energetic death songs I've heard.

Yeah, for sure. Death is a very energetic concept, actually. Usually you hear music like a dirge, or a funereal type of music, or actual funeral march or something like that. But when you think of it, something that can actually extinguish the life of something actually has a lot of power behind it.

That reminds me of "Slaughterhouse-Five," where the Trafalmadorians say that death isn't so much a tragedy, just a point where you're not really doing so hot.

Well, that's the thing. Kurt Vonnegut was a big influence on both myself and Walter, so it's interesting that you bring that out.

You said that mortality was on your mind with some of the writing on this album. Would you care to talk about that a little bit?

Well, I'm 58 now, so you start thinking, "I have so many years left, what am I gonna do?" Also my mother died a couple years ago, so I started thinking about that. And since I'm a New Yorker, I was particularly affected by 9/11 on a more social level.

Was that ghost sort of hovering over the rest of the album?

Just like Morph the Cat, definitely. (chuckles)

Not a lot of people know what Chronax (a drug referred to in "Brite Nightgown") is. In fact, the only info I could find on it was in French.

I thought I made it up. What is Chronax?

Well, it was in French, so I don't really know -- it seemed like it had something to do with electrical impulses. Maybe electroshock?

Oh. See, I was just trying to figure out the name of a drug that would allow you to go back in time. Since "chrono" is a prefix meaning "time," I thought that was a good name for the drug.

Well, we'll get started on that later today -- we'll let you know how it works.

Maybe French people have that already, and that's why they are the way they are.

"The Great Pagoda of Funn" is probably my favorite song on the record. There haven't been a lot of straightforward love declarations from you. On "The Nightfly" there were a couple -- "Maxine" and "Walk Between Raindrops." It reminds me of something a songwriter once said: that he couldn't write a love song without having an escape clause in verse three.

(Laughs) Yeah! That's a good one. Kind of like a pre-nup or something.

Do you sense that this kind of love songwriting is something that's reserved for your solo work, or that it's something difficult to come up with?

You're right, actually. In Steely Dan material, if there was a love song, there had to be a pre-nup in there somewhere. Exactly right.

Even in "The Great Pagoda of Funn" there's kind of an escape clause: "When we fight, those hungry wolves close in." There's at least some sort of relation between what's going on in the relationship and what's going on outside. In this song they feed off each other, but in the other song ("Mary Shut the Garden Door"), it seems like the outside is sort of invading.

Well, yeah. The idea is in the relationship, the pagoda is kind of a fortress against the outside, but I think it's questionable as to whether it's a well-defended-enough fortress. I think (in "Mary Shut the Garden Door") it's true that the outside is kind of encroaching on the relationship, that maybe it's this kind of relationship that doesn't seem as invulnerable as it does in the pagoda song.

You got the idea for "Mary" during the Republican convention in New York?

Yeah. I'm a New Yorker, so a lot of people in that Republican convention came to New York. [New Yorkers] were saying, "Why don't you have it in Indianapolis or something?" 'cause New York's basically a Democratic town. The hotels started filling up with a lot of Christian groups and stuff like that. New Yorkers don't usually see that sort of thing, except for the tourists. So it started me thinking, What if the far right wing took over the country? Of course that couldn't happen here.

You sing that you "sensed the new condition." Did you see this kind of wave in America happening before Sept. 11 and sense this was predestined in some way?

Not really. For me, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, it was an ominous signal for me. Now he's sort of seen as the Great Communicator. I never thought like that myself -- quite the opposite. I think that the right wing used Sept. 11 in the most cynical way, by using it to incite fear and put over their program in that way. To me it all seems pretty scary.

There seemed like there was a long layoff between "Kamakiriad" and this, but actually there wasn't, because you were working with Steely Dan quite a bit. How did getting back together with Walter Becker come about? I know he produced "Kamakiriad."

I hadn't worked with Walter in some time. I was having trouble with "Kamakiriad," sort of organizing myself. Walter and I had been talking on the phone, and I said, "Hey, why don't you come to New York and you can help me out with this?" So he was producing, and at the same time I was doing this project called the New York Rock 'n' Soul Revue. When we went out on the road with that, the second year Walter came out and played the guitar. I was doing a few Steely Dan songs, and they got a big response. So the year after that we went out with a new Steely Dan type of band, and we've just been doing that ever since.

Are you surprised at how Steely Dan's music has persevered? Not because it's not good, but because it is probably what you could call idiosyncratic, at least lyrically. It seems a little bit more complex than what the popular flavor would be.

I think we were both surprised that it lasted so long. We were surprised at the reaction it got in the Rock 'n' Soul Revue when we would do those songs. Some of them weren't the hit songs -- we didn't do "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," we were doing songs that we liked that were album cuts for the most part. People really seemed to like them, so we knew that they still had some life there. Even though some of the lyrics were maybe more poetic than obvious, I think there's a kind of feeling about them that they make sense in a way that cuts through some of that, and that people really understand what we were trying to say. Even though the music maybe comes out of jazz, at least in the harmony, people like that. It's not the kind of guitar triads that people have been used to the last 40 years or whatever. I think people were hungry for that in a certain way.

We mentioned Kurt Vonnegut earlier. Did you have any literary influences that might have seeped through those lyrics at all?

Oh, sure. I think one of our main influences comes from books. Walter and I, when we met in college, part of the reason, aside from musical parallels, we also liked the same writers. At the time we met in '67, but in the late '50s and early '60s there was a kind of movement called "black humor" -- which had nothing to do with African-Americans, it was this kind of dark humor. The main writers that were sort of grouped together were people like Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern, Thomas Berger, Philip Roth was sort of in that scene & Vladimir Nabokov also. We both were kind of fans of that type of thing. Also certain science-fiction writers, and so on.

Philip K. Dick could fit with a lot of your themes.

Yeah. Basically satirical writers, I'd say.

Do you keep up with any modern music at all?

Not a lot. There's a few things I like, but I basically listen to the same 40 records I had in high school, except now they're CDs. There's a few things I hear. I like eels; I think that guy writes good lyrics. Martha Wainwright -- Rufus' sister, Loudon's daughter. She's a good songwriter and a great singer.

There was a long time when Steely Dan didn't tour, and that was kind of viewed as the opposite of what the record industry wanted its artists to do. It seemed like you, and other folks known for not touring, like Harry Nilsson, spent a lot of time making really great studio albums.

Well, if you don't tour, you have more of a chance to concentrate on recording.

Do you worry about being able to reproduce the sound of the album on stage?

I never worry about that, 'cause coming out of the jazz world, no one ever used to think about stuff like that. If you don't have the exact same instrumentation, you just cover it in some other way. There's a line you wanna get in, you have somebody else play it. It's not really a big deal.

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