Donald Fagen - Disc of the day

Donald Fagen
Kamakiriad

(Reprise, 1993)

Steely Dan’s best non-Steely Dan album.

With Steely Dan on hold for most of the ’80s and ’90s, workshy Donald Fagen and Walter Becker managed just three solo albums between them. Fagen's debut, 1982’s The Nightfly, was an open love letter to the music he’d heard as a teenager growing up in ’50s America. Kamakiriad arrived after a protracted spell of writer's block, and was a muddled concept album in which Fagen's narrator travelled towards the Millennium in a dream car (the Kamakirii), negotiating the perils of middle age along the way... Keep up, please. In contrary Steely Dan style, Walter Becker produced it, co-wrote one track (the sublime Snowbound) and even played bass guitar, so no wonder Kamakiriad feels warmly familiar. Trans-Island Skyway and Tomorrow's Girls embody the spirit: summery al fresco jazz meets nightclub cool. Fagen jousts with the female backing singers like a rheumy, white Ray Charles on Countermoon; plays the reflective male divorcee in a cocktail jazz bar during On The Dunes, and delivers the best song Steely Dan never recorded (Snowbound again). Kamakiriad made it to Number 10 in the Billboard charts, an achievement in the year of Garth Brooks and Bat Out Of Hell II, and was critic and man's-man author Tony Parsons' tip for The Greatest Thing I've Heard All Year in MOJO. Too quickly forgotten after Fagen and Becker revived the Dan brand for 2000's Two Against Nature, it's actually better than anything the pair have done since.

Mark Blake

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 12/06/2008