Alan Parsons Project vs Steely Dan

kenethlevine wrote: APP I don't doubt SD's talent but they seemed to have the knack of arranging that made most of their songs stale before they finished playing the first time

It just goes to show how very subjective our experience of music is, as I find just the opposite - SD's chords and harmonies seem endlessly fresh to me, as enjoyable now as they were when I started listening to them over thirty years ago. And I must have listened to each of the first seven albums hundreds of times. Very very few bands have that quality for me.

AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: kenethlevine wrote: APP I don't doubt SD's talent but they seemed to have the knack of arranging that made most of their songs stale before they finished playing the first time Sorry but that doesn't really make sense. If they were good at arranging how would that make their songs stale?

Strange how SD is full of talented musicianship but sound very ‘ordinary’ to me. APP maybe aren’t as technically proficient though I do like their earlier albums a lot.

AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: kenethlevine wrote: APP I don't doubt SD's talent but they seemed to have the knack of arranging that made most of their songs stale before they finished playing the first time Sorry but that doesn't really make sense. If they were good at arranging how would that make their songs stale?

Steely Dan !!!

rogerthat wrote: I am also surprised you don't find much spontaneity in Countdown to Ecstasy (assuming since you didn't mention anything about it) which was with a 'real band' still and does sound like one to me, especially My Old School.

Polymorphia wrote: Critical acclaim, commercial success, and the respect of musicians have nothing to do with it.

micky wrote: Polymorphia wrote: Critical acclaim, commercial success, and the respect of musicians have nothing to do with it. those have everything to do with it.  case in point...  care to name the bands which you believe met those same conditions.  Whose work resonated with music critics, and was able to appeal to listeners of all stripes those actually sell boatloads of albums, yet attain of a validity born of a near universal respect of the musician world.   the reason why it means so much.. is you might find it very hard to come up with list of any length.  Many bands, we are talking big bands, can hit a couple, very VERY few can stake claim to all 3.

Nope. Success is not directly correlated to skill or quality. Plus even if it were, making it the basis of appreciation as individual listeners, as you are doing here, would make it an unreliable measure anyway, and that would be a circular argument, as well.

Edited by Polymorphia - January 19 2019 at 09:18

Polymorphia wrote: micky wrote: Polymorphia wrote: Critical acclaim, commercial success, and the respect of musicians have nothing to do with it. those have everything to do with it.  case in point...  care to name the bands which you believe met those same conditions.  Whose work resonated with music critics, and was able to appeal to listeners of all stripes those actually sell boatloads of albums, yet attain of a validity born of a near universal respect of the musician world.   the reason why it means so much.. is you might find it very hard to come up with list of any length.  Many bands, we are talking big bands, can hit a couple, very VERY few can stake claim to all 3.  Nope. Success is not directly correlated to skill or quality. Plus even if it were, making it the basis of appreciation as individual listeners, as you are doing here, would make it an unreliable measure anyway, and that would be a circular argument, as well.

I understand Micky's point and it is that it takes a LOT for a band or artist to meet all those three conditions. Singer songwriters attain it more easily - Dylan of course and also Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin among others. Among bands, I can readily think of Beatles and not a lot of others. I don't think he is saying a band must have all three to be regarded great but those who have it are special, they kind of attain the golden middle. My absolute favourite composer of all - even after all the wonderful rock/prog etc I have been exposed to - Ilayaraja also ticked all three boxes. That said, I would not put SD in the same bracket as him or the Beatles. The truth is they were still toiling for that elusive hit when they set out to record Aja. And then, Peg became a hit and the single FM too. So it was a late surge rather than a long streak of bill board smashing stuff that also won the approval of critics AND had fellow musicians intrigued. That category is so rare the folks who fit into it pretty much popularised a new way of looking at popular music. A paradigm shift, in other words.

Snicolette wrote: Sean Trane wrote: SD's tunes are extremely finely crafted (maybe too much so) that rare are the Dan tracks that feel fresh & spontaneous or even less as "immediate". Excitement is certainly not a feeling I'll feel when I listen to SD (or APP, FTM). SD thought their concept so thouroughly that any dust of improvication is automatically annihilated by their mercyless and pityless professionalism Here is a bit about SD's studio crafting, I was looking up some things about their times at The Village Recorder and found this in an interview with Dick LaPalm, former manager at The Village, regarding "Aja,"   <span style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span> <span style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">"During the same recording session, the second engineer Lenise Bent, came into my office. She said, 'Dick, I have to talk to you.' She put her head down on the desk in her arms and said, 'Well-the, well-the, well-the.' I said, 'What are you doing?'</span> <p style="margin: 7.5pt 0in 18.75pt; -: initial; -: initial; -size: initial; -repeat: initial; -attachment: initial; -origin: initial; -clip: initial;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif; color:#333333">Lenise looked up and said, 'Dick, I have to get off the Aja session. They worked on the words ‘well the’ for six hours last night. It's on Home at Last, for the the line, Well the danger on the rocks is surely past. All they did was work those two words for just the right sound for hours. I really have to get off the session.'</span> <p style="margin: 7.5pt 0in 18.75pt; -: initial; -: initial; -size: initial; -repeat: initial; -attachment: initial; -origin: initial; -clip: initial;"><span style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">"I said, 'Look Lenise, if you want off, that’s no problem. I’ll get another second. But it will be the biggest mistake you will ever make. You’re going to have a credit on </span><em style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Aja,<span style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> and the album is going to be huge.' So she stayed, and to this day she thanks me as a running joke [</span><em style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">laughs<span style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">]."</span> <p style="margin: 7.5pt 0in 18.75pt; -: initial; -: initial; -size: initial; -repeat: initial; -attachment: initial; -origin: initial; -clip: initial;"><span style="color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The entire article is here: </span>[COLOR=#333333" face="Arial, sans-serif]<span style="font-size: 13.3333px;]https://www.jazzwax.com/2011/07/how-steely-dan-got-wayne-shorter.html</span>[/COLOR] <p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 25px; color: rgb51, 51, 51; font-family: Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: medium; padding-left: 30px;">

There's actually a whole book about the making of Aja, and if you like the band and the album as much as I do it makes for fascinating reading. Their obsessive tendencies really got free reign on that one, but I think the results speak for themselves