Still I Remain Tied to the Mast. . .

I am always looking for the language with which to explain what it is about particular music that I like. I understand that for many (most?) people music is a purely visceral experience – they either like it or they don’t, get used to it or not – but I like to think about why certain music appeals to me or doesn’t appeal to me, and sometimes in that thinking songs I once despised grow worthy of some kind of eccentric love, or songs I once loved unequivocally take on a tarnish that in time I work through and love because of the tarnish, not despite it.

Steely Dan is one of those bands people seem to have strong feelings about one way or another, but for me Steely Dan was one of those bands I grew to love as I learned to listen to it. Yes, it can seem like that breezy vapid bougie pseudo-jazz, and if you ever hear it as background music at a party then that is exactly what it is – It can serve that purpose. Easy. But I think any band that names itself after a dildo from Naked Lunch deserves an open-minded listen, and Aja is one of the finest albums ever produced. Period. It is just fine layered music with a kind of aplomb darkness at the center of that breeziness. The title track is just fun to listen to.

I love how each verse has its little airy intro, almost tricking the ear into thinking the whole verse will be like that, but then picking up the tempo to finish the verse and go on to the refrain “Aja / when all my dime dancing is through / I run to you” and then the whole thing kind of dissolves back into that very tenuous melody of the intro section of the next verse. What I really love about the chorus is how the piano is doubling the vocal melody using rich chords, and the tom-toms on the drum-kit are tuned to them adding the perfect rhythmic harmonic weight to the words.

The bridge, a long instrumental section after the second verse, has this perfect and simple two-chord progression that starts out on the guitar which uses repetition to upset aural expectation. A lead guitar plays over it with almost banal excellence, but it is those two chords that do it for me. It is just so languid, lazy, just barely keeping time. There is tension there, and the whole thing builds on that tension until the piano and those tuned toms I mentioned before are all hitting those two chords back and forth, forth and back, while the sax cuts in improvising over the top of it. The whole thing almost completely dissolves, again it threatens to become so fractured melodically it might disappear, but then little intro section of the third verse and back to the that picked-up tempo – but this time instead of dissolving again, the chorus takes up the two-chord refrain from the bridge in recapitulation, building on it more and more as the song fades out.

But Aja is potent stuff. It is not an album I can listen to too often or too much. It is an album that demands attention, and as its slides into the background it almost becomes obnoxious. I mean, Michael McDonald’s harmonies on 'Peg' can be nauseating, and I mean that in a good way – I just have no other way of explaining it. Like yogurt, curdled and delicious… Perhaps it is schizophrenic music, and that is the reason for the strong reactions to it. Because if I am honest about it, as much as I love it in this moment of listening, I know there have been times I have had it come on one time too many in a given time frame and have felt sick of it, disgusted with its baroque pretensions – but again, in those moments I still know how good it is. Maybe it is too good…