Featured Essay: Remembering Steely Dan 2.0: Two Against Nature at 25

by Nick Fleisher

I entered college in the fall of 1997 already a Steely Dan obsessive. From the start, my experience of the group had been tinged with a kind of false nostalgia. When I started listening to Aja in high school, I immediately recognized several of the songs from mix tapes my dad had made for road trips in my early childhood. This group was somehow stirring dormant memories from the distant past. It was not the sort of thing that happens to a teenager every day.

I got to know the catalog: the seven original albums, the solo work from the ’80s and early ’90s, the live album from the ’93 and ’94 reunion tours. I shared them with other music friends, who generally responded with polite disinterest; there were other, more important ’60s and ’70s groups to be into. I picked out some songs on the piano and the electric bass. I listened over and over.

College was the first time I had a regular internet connection and an email address. I arrived the week that Princess Diana and Richie Ashburn died. I learned to read the news online. And I discovered that I could get news about my favorite bands from their websites. Most of it was tour dates and the goofy experimentation of the early web. But people were quickly figuring out how to make something interesting out of it.

One of those people was Walter Becker. The Steely Dan website was full of writing: tales of touring, letters to imaginary lawyers and producers, salty riffs on current releases. It was florid and abstruse and frequently very funny. And, more and more as time wore on, there were updates on recording. A new album was in the works and Walter Becker was publishing news, notes, and tales of his and Donald Fagen’s doings directly to the web. Long before the age of blogs and social media, here was Becker, wonderfully ahead of his time, holding forth online for all the world and all the fans to see.

As the clock ran out on the ’90s, the “News about the New One” section finally revealed a name (Two Against Nature) and a release date (February 29, 2000). The name was easy to read in reference to Becker and Fagen themselves, still wielding studio perfectionism as a weapon against the forces of chaos and entropy as they hit their 50s. The leap day release was one last joke on everyone, a deliberate tweak of an anxious fan base after a two-decade wait for a new album.

The album was launched with a promotional effort befitting the return of an Important Band. This being the year 2000, that meant reviews in all the music magazines, a taped VH1 special, and, eventually, an Album of the Year Grammy and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. There was a single—“Cousin Dupree”—a suspiciously straight ahead blues with just-skeezy-enough lyrics and not much else going on. The song seemed expressly designed to absorb the media attention coming the group’s way, and indeed, almost every published review included a dutiful blow-by-blow of Dupree’s borderline incestuousness. Beyond that, the reception was mixed.

I got my copy at Cutler’s—which in that era had dozens of CD players on inaccessibly high shelves, each playing a new release on repeat, headphones dangling down within reach—and raced back to my apartment to listen. I grew to like the album. Becker and Fagen had been known since at least the middle of their ’70s run for a kind of maniacal approach to recording. And while they famously burned out during the long and arduous process of making Gaucho (1980), their perfectionist tendencies, if anything, only intensified in their later work. From Aja (1977) onward, the overall sound is extremely clean. But Two Against Nature, like Fagen’s 1993 album Kamakiriad before it, is also cold in a way their pre-hiatus recordings are not. Fagen’s voice is thinner and reedier than it was in his 20s; there is a lot of falsetto, and the lyrics are frequently hard to make out. The guitars and snare drum are crisp and full of high end. And while to some extent this just reflects changes in studio fashion and recording techniques across a 20-year gap, the overall effect yields a kind of sonic shallowness. If Steely Dan’s ’70s recordings are a lovely, ponderous cathode ray tube, Two Against Nature is a svelte flatscreen.

Musically and lyrically, the album has some real high points. Becker and Fagen are at their strongest when writing flawed character studies set in real places (“What a Shame about Me,” “Janie Runaway,” “Jack of Speed”) and at their weakest when they veer into stylized, vaguely francophile world-building (“Two Against Nature,” “West of Hollywood”). The drumming is immaculate, as always. Tom Barney, fixture of their ’90s tours, takes over Chuck Rainey’s role as the serious bass player, for when Becker himself won’t do. There are new chops guys: Jon Herington and Chris Potter. Becker’s lead guitar parts, continuing a pattern begun on “Tomorrow’s Girls” from Kamakiriad, consistently morph between the virtuosic and the merely noodly. And Fagen’s signature sound—Fender Rhodes played through a phaser pedal—sounds as great as ever, its wonderfully warm rubberiness standing out in a field of staccato treble. There is an opening track that suffers from all of the failings mentioned earlier but still somehow works (“Gaslighting Abbie”), a song with a vibraphone solo (“Negative Girl”), and what passes for a sentimental love song (“Almost Gothic”). “Cousin Dupree,” seventh of nine songs on the album, is an obvious afterthought.

Looking back from 25 years later, Two Against Nature fits cleanly into the long second act of Becker and Fagen’s careers. Everything from Kamakiriad onward is of a piece. And if Two Against Nature is their strongest effort from this period, and the one I still listen to most often, the fact that it beat out Kid A, Midnite Vultures, and The Marshall Mathers LP for the Album of the Year Grammy seems even more ridiculous now than it did at the time.

We’re also now a quarter century removed from the last real wave of media interest in Steely Dan—not today’s very online, John Mulaney-type professions of fandom, but industry attention to Becker and Fagen themselves. In early 2000, it was possible to turn on cable TV and see them sitting for interviews and sharing knowing looks as they wearily fucked with hapless reporters half their age. It was delightful. “Which previous album was your favorite?” asked one.

Becker: “I always thought Kind of Blue was a good one.”

Nick Fleisher is a linguist at UW-Milwaukee and lifelong music enthusiast. Brushes with musical fame include meeting Hall and Oates backstage at age 11 courtesy of Irish music legend Mick Moloney, handing a pair of scissors to Emanuel Ax, playing bass in a band that opened for the Disco Biscuits, and seeing Donald Fagen in a midtown movie theater lobby.

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