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Steely Dan

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

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Steely Dan, formed by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen after they met as students at Bard College, built a reputation for exacting studio perfectionism, reportedly employing dozens of different session musicians on individual tracks until achieving precisely the performance they wanted. Their jazz-influenced chord voicings and famously cryptic, literary lyrics distinguished Steely Dan's songwriting from more straightforward rock contemporaries, and the duo's 1977 album Aja is widely regarded as one of the most sonically pristine and meticulously produced rock albums ever recorded. Becker and Fagen's decision to stop regular touring in the mid-1970s to focus entirely on studio recording, an unusual choice for a commercially successful rock act at the time, reflected the duo's prioritization of studio craft and technical precision over live performance. Steely Dan's combination of jazz-inflected musical sophistication and their exacting studio methodology has made them one of the most retroactively influential acts associated with the smooth, polished "yacht rock" sound later named and popularized as a genre descriptor decades after their initial 1970s commercial peak.

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