Morph the Cat is one of my favorite albums but using a metric many may not consider: total listens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morph_the_Cat
There's probably albums that speak to me more lyrically, musically, by artists I have followed more closely or loved more.
The Seduction of Claude Debussy - Art of Noise
Morph the Cat is just infinitely listenable, and I have never grown tired of it.
Twelve years ago during my year of writing the t-shirts blog, I tried to list my favorite albums, and the metric I chose was total listens.
That blog post is here:
- Vangelis - The Soundtrack to Blade Runner
- Brian Eno & David Byrne - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
- David Bowie - Low
- Laurie Anderson - Mister Heartbreak
- Cocteau Twins - VictoriaLand
- Pink Floyd - Animals
- Donald Fagen - Morph the Cat
- King Crimson - Discipline
- 10,000 Maniacs - The Wishing Chair
- Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
In some cases, the most listens does not equate to favorite but usually it matches.
Oddly, in the ten-plus years of daily HEY MOM and SENSE OF DOUBT posts, I have never posted about Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat.
Also, I have never really investigated its meaning.
Check this out:
So, is Morph a symbol for Alzheimer’s?
I will reprint the entire article of the above farther below along with two other articles.
This is a great album. I hope if you discover it because of my post that you love it, too, and maybe you start listening to it every day as I did.
Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat album
Track listing
All songs written by Donald Fagen.
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Morph the Cat" | 6:49 |
| 2. | "H Gang" | 5:15 |
| 3. | "What I Do" | 6:01 |
| 4. | "Brite Nitegown" | 7:16 |
| 5. | "The Great Pagoda of Funn" | 7:39 |
| 6. | "Security Joan" | 6:09 |
| 7. | "The Night Belongs to Mona" | 4:18 |
| 8. | "Mary Shut the Garden Door" | 6:29 |
| 9. | "Morph the Cat (Reprise)" | 2:53 |
https://steelydanreader.com/2006/06/03/who-is-morph-the-cat/
Who Is Morph the Cat?
By Fred Kaplan
Slate
It doesn’t happen often, but whenever Steely Dan — or one of its leaders, Donald Fagen or Walter Becker — comes out with a new album, the band’s more obsessive fans pore over the lyric sheets like a squad of Yalie lit crits, scrambling to decipher the cryptic allusions. They’re the most craftily literate rhymes in rock, something like what Dylan might have written had he come of age, as Fagen and Becker did, amid late-’60s irony instead of early-’60s earnestness. Fagen has just released (2006) a new solo album — his first in 13 years, his third ever. It’s called Morph the Cat, and the hunt for meaning is once more afoot.
On the surface, Morph sounds like a standard Steely Dan album: the catchy hooks, the dense harmonies, and the super-slick production values, leavened by Fagen’s nasal troubadour vocals. The songs have some of the same themes of yore: death, decay, illusion, and loss, spiked with a hipster’s black humor instead of miasmic despair. Yet as I’ve noted elsewhere (and I’m hardly alone on this count), there’s something different about the new Fagen album: He sort of means what he’s singing this time; he’s not completely serious (all his albums, as he once put it, are comedy albums in a sense), but the songs are more sorrowful than usual. There’s an apprehension of mortality that, he’s said, stems from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (a few miles from his Manhattan apartment), the death of his mother (after a long bout of Alzheimer’s), and his own advancing years (58 this past January, 2006).
Has this end-of-days consciousness triggered an impulse for clarity? He sings more intelligibly on Morph than on the last two Steely Dan albums (Two Against Nature in 2000 and Everything Must Go in ’03). As for the lyrics themselves, he’s deigned — for the first time — to explain some of them in his liner notes. He informs us, so we don’t have to do our own research, that the song “Brite Nightgown” refers to W.C. Fields’ pet name for the grim reaper (“the fella in the bright nightgown”); that “What I Do” is “a conversation between some younger version of myself and the ghost of Ray Charles.” And he invites us to put a political gloss on “Mary Shut the Garden Door,” which his notes summarize as “Paranoia blooms when a thuggish cult gains control of the government.”
But what about the title song, which starts and finishes the CD — the full song as an opener, a one-verse reprise as a finale — like the covers of a storybook? It’s a jolly holiday tune, with a thick-soled bass line, about a cat named Morph who flies above Manhattan, swooping through apartments and workplaces, bringing good cheer to all. Yet the liner notes suggest both sinister and holy sides: “A vast ghostly cat-thing descends on New York City, bestowing on its citizens a kind of rapture.” What’s going on here?
First the name: Morph. Is it short for Morpheus, the god of dreams? Is Morph putting the citizens to sleep? In the refrain, Fagen sings of how Morph’s spell makes you feel:
It’s kind of like an Arctic mindbath
Cool and sweet and slightly rough
Liquid light on New York City
Like Christmas without the chintzy stuff
“Arctic mindbath” — isn’t that briskly evocative of Alzheimer’s, the disease that numbed Fagen’s mother’s mind? When I interviewed Fagen for a New York Times profile, I offered up this interpretation. He said he didn’t have that meaning in mind, but that the idea sent a tingle up his spine, so maybe there’s something to it. Later in the song, he sings:
Like you heard an Arlen tune
Or bought yourself a crazy hat
Fagen’s mother was a child singer in the Catskills. When he was growing up in the Jersey suburbs, she sang standards around the house, and she had a special penchant for Harold Arlen tunes. And, by the way, she met her husband while working in the office of a hat maker.
So, is Morph a symbol for Alzheimer’s? Not quite. But Fagen has said in several interviews that Morph is “narcotizing” the citizenry, that the cat’s a metaphor for the “mind-death” that’s entranced much of the country, the result of “layers of brain-washing that’s gone on for so many years” from “the techniques of political machines” to “the unbelievable stupidity on television.” Morph is a pleasure to watch, at first — Fagen’s lyrics call him “this Rabelaisian puff of smoke,” a reference to Francois Rabelais, the ribald 16th-century satirical novelist — but he’s sinister, maybe even deadly in the end — like narcotics — and like Alzheimer’s, which Fagen says had a calming effect on his mother in its early phases (“She’d been a nervous person”) before it ravaged her.
The album, too, starts out merry, then gets dark. There’s “Brite Nightgown,” the jingle-jangle song about dying, and “The Great Pagoda of Funn,” a frankly sentimental ballad about two lovers who try to shut out the harsh world. “Security Joan,” a comic, up-tempo blues number about a man who falls for an airport security guard, nonetheless has terrorism as its plot-premise. “The Night Belongs to Mona” is about a suicidal young woman, dancing in her high-rise late at night, afraid to go out in the day (“Was it the fire downtown/ that turned her world around?” Fagen sings, in the album’s only explicit reference to 9/11). “Mary Shut the Garden Door,” which has the hook of a paranoid political thriller and the imagery of an aliens-attack movie, is, at bottom, about triumphant Republicans. (Fagen wrote it right after the 2004 GOP Convention, which was an invasion of sorts of New York City.) After “Mary” comes the reprise of the title song, and after all we’ve been through, its final and once-gleeful line, “All watch the skies for Morph the Cat,” suddenly seems very ominous.
So, there’s a reason “Morph the Cat” serves as not only the album’s title but also its bookends. Its imagery fuses Fagen’s private tragedy with what he sees as his country’s political and cultural tragedies. And Morph also reflects the gist of Fagen’s music: catchy rhythms disguising calamitous content. Is Fagen Morph the Cat? There’s something vaguely feline about that photo of him on the CD cover, sitting right next to the heating duct that Morph seeps through. Or has he locked himself away from the world, like Mona or the couple in the great Pagoda of Funn, sitting there gravely, on one side a desk crammed with pencils and paintbrushes, on the other a window from which he too can “watch the skies”? Or is he a bit of both, embodying the spirit of Morph and of his narcotized admirers?
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/donald-fagen
Donald Fagen
Morph The Cat, Donald Fagen's third solo album in 24 years, sees Fagen and engineer Elliott Scheiner continue their quest for the best possible sound quality — which, it seems, comes only from analogue recording.
Having wowed the music world during the 1970s with seven studio albums full of their signature hyper-intelligent mixture of rock, soul, jazz, R&B, blues and whatever else took their fancy, Steely Dan went AWOL for more than a decade in 1980. Their silence was only punctuated by Donald Fagen's best-selling 1982 album The Nightfly, his rather less successful Kamakiriad (1993), and Walter Becker's 11 Tracks Of Whack (1994). However, the Dan duo returned to the live stage in 1993, and eventually recorded the Grammy-winning Two Against Nature (2000), their first studio album in two decades, followed by a second, Everything Must Go — the recording of which was the subject of an SOS article in May 2003.
And now Fagen is back on the solo path again with a new album, Morph The Cat. When queried about the reason for releasing a solo album at a time when Steely Dan are still standing, Fagen simply offers that he's not as good at taking holidays as Becker is. Given that Fagen lives in New York City and Becker on Kauai, Hawaii, this is, perhaps, not surprising. Fagen has also gone on record stating that his three solo albums form a trilogy, with The Nightfly charting the outlook of a young man, Kamakiriad a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, and Morph The Cat an expression of a man in the last stage of his life. (Fagen is only 58, but describes the album as an attempt to "forestall whatever there is to forestall".)
Imaginary Friends
Walter Becker was not in any way involved in the making of Morph The Cat, making this Fagen's first-ever DIY production, and allowing him to follow his own instincts. "I did miss Walter at times," comments Fagen, "but when I had a question I just imagined that he was there, and that worked pretty well." He was, however, aided by the familiar presence of Elliott Scheiner, a five-time Grammy-winning living legend of the American recording industry, who has worked with virtually everybody, and with Fagen since Steely Dan's fifth album, The Royal Scam (1976).
"Elliott is usually there for the beginning and the end," says Fagen. "He recorded the basic tracks and I used other engineers for overdubbing — which is the part of the recording that takes the longest — and he later comes in to mix the album. Elliott doesn't like to do overdubbing, because he's too impatient. He prefers to do the easy stuff! But he did a great job recording all the instruments as full as possible, which is strictly due to his expertise. I'll come into the control room during tracking and will give some comments, like 'It sounds good,' or 'The snare could be better,' or 'Perhaps the bass needs a dB extra at 250Hz or something.' But basically Elliott knows what I like, and we have very similar taste."
Although Steely Dan wore their love of studio technology on their sleeves, it seems that this was driven more by Walter Becker and engineer Roger Nichols than by Fagen. "Roger and Walter were always more interested in technology and in what the latest thing was," explains Fagen. "Walter's father was a hi-fi nut in the late '50s and '60s, and Walter is a science prodigy who went to Stuyvesant High School in New York, a specialist school for kids who are really good at science. I also got into high fidelity and I like good sounds, but I was never as much into the technical side of things."
Elliott Scheiner, who also worked on The Nightfly but not on Kamakiriad, agrees, but finds that things have changed. "Donald has become much more savvy as far as what takes place in the studio is concerned," he says. "He now knows what the technical issues are and what can and can't be done, whereas a dozen years ago Donald didn't know or didn't care, he just wanted to get things done. For this new album it was a great process to be working just with him, and he definitely made a lot of comments, but he is not specific about certain things. As far as EQ is concerned, he'll say 'I want a bit more top end there, or low end on the voice,' general comments like that."
The Decline Of Keyboards
Donald Fagen's interest in the ins and outs of recording technology might have grown in recent years, but when it comes to the tools of his trade — keyboards — the opposite is true. "From an instrument point of view, I find that the technical developments in keyboards since the '70s are not worth talking about. I experimented with all sorts of synthesizers at the time. I recall that my first synthesizer was an ARP Odyssey, which I used on the early Steely Dan records. Somebody gave me a Synergy and that had some interesting sounds that I used on The Nightfly.
"I don't use many synthesizers any more. Basically I'm too impatient to be using computers and synthesizers, and end up with something that's not as good as what live players do. I find that the sounds you get out of most synthesizers are basically degraded. Especially if you're playing a full-sized keyboard, there are a lot of tuning problems, with wrong harmonics that annoy me. They're also not stretch-tuned properly so that the upper notes are a little flat and the lower notes are a little sharp, so for the most part I play only tuneable instruments, like acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer and so on. I do have a Triton and a Kurzweil K2500, and use them for special effects and when I can get away with only using part of the keyboard, like if I want to mimic a flute or a mallet instrument or an organ. Organs aren't tuneable, and are flat, weird-sounding anyway."
On both Fagen's first two solo albums, The Nightfly and Kamakiriad, mention is made of the use of sampling technology, while Morph The Cat has none of it. What has changed? "We started using sequencing and stuff on [Steely Dan's] Gaucho," replies Fagen, "out of desperation really. We were having trouble laying down 'Hey Nineteen'. We tried it with two different bands and it still didn't work, so one of us said something like 'It's too bad that we can't get a machine to play the beat we want, with full-frequency drum sounds, and to be able to move the snare drum and kick drum around independently.' Roger [Nichols] replied 'I can do that.' This was back in 1978 or something, so we said 'You can do that???' To which he said 'Yes, all I need is $150,000.' So we gave him the money out of our recording budget, and six weeks later he came in with this machine and that is how it all started."
The pioneering machine was the now-legendary Wendel, reportedly based on a CompuPro S100 computer with an CPM/86 operating system. It was capable of replacing already recorded sounds and moving them around, rather than constructing a drum track from scratch. "This was in the days when digital was still very primitive," recalls Fagen. "Roger's machine did not even have any switches, it only had a regular computer keyboard and he had to type all these bytes out, huge lists of numbers, which took him 20 minutes, and at the end he would hit Return, and we heard this one snare a beat. It took so long. It got a little better during The Nightfly, but it was so horrible, I have tried to figure out how to get out of sampling ever since."
Roger Nichols has continued to develop his drum replacement technology, which he has now made available as a plug-in called Wendeliser (see www.rndigital.com).
Clinton Administration
The memories of engineer and artist occasionally diverge in the telling of the story of the recording Morph The Cat, but they agree on the basic facts. Tracking began in August 2004, at Clinton Recording Studios in New York. Fagen, second keyboard player Ted Baker, guitarists Wayne Krantz and John Herrington, Freddie Washington, drummer Keith Carlock, and Scheiner gathered there for two weeks to lay down all the backing tracks. The only difference from the Everything Must Go tracking line-up was that Krantz had replaced Hugh McCracken.
Fagen (right) with Elliott Scheiner, who engineered Morph The Cat as well as previous Fagen and Steely Dan projects."I'm too lazy to look for other guys," comments Fagen. "These guys are really good anyway, and it's nice to have a band that you can communicate with. Walter and I took a long time to find this band, and I really enjoy playing with them. I'd done demos for some older songs on a computer that died [a Mac Quadra running Opcode's Vision software], and I had a hell of a time getting the information off a disk and into Logic. I also arranged some new songs on an Apple computer, using the Garage Band program, and I played these demos for the musicians. I always write on the piano, but I like to create this little mock-up in the computer.
"I'll quickly put down a bass part in Garage Band using a keyboard, then a fake guitar using a keyboard, and the simplest basic drum beat, and it gives the musicians an idea of how the song goes. I usually also write out the keyboard part, and sometimes the bass part, though the guitar parts are worked out by the guitarists, and I'll modify what they're playing. We go back and forth until it sounds good. All kids know how to use the Garage Band program, and it's good to write like that, because all you need is a tiny keyboard that you plug into your computer. Keyboard magazines hate me when I say things like this, because I'm a threat to their existence. Basically I'm saying 'You don't need any of that fancy stuff.'"
"I think Donald sent CDs of the demos to the guys," elaborates Scheiner, from his studio in Connecticut, "and before we started each song he'd play the demo for the band, to refresh their memories and talk about it. The demos were just a sketchpad — I'm pretty sure there weren't any vocals on them, just a keyboard playing the melody part. He'd done a couple of rehearsals with the band before coming into the studio, but I don't think that every song was rehearsed; there were at least three or four songs that I'm pretty sure the band first heard when they came into the studio. Then, while recording them in the studio, it's a work in progress. During tracking Donald would always play with the band, calling out certain changes."
Scheiner's Mic Choices
According to Elliott Scheiner, the following mics were used on the Morph The Cat recording sessions.
The Sound Of The Room
The backing tracks for Morph The Cat were recorded during a two-week period at Clinton Studio A, which has a live room that's large enough to hold 85 players, with wooden floor and wooden wall-panelling ('one of the last big rooms on the East Coast' claims their web site). In this case it held six. "Everybody was set up in the same room, except for the acoustic piano," explains Scheiner. "Sometimes Donald played the piano, sometimes Ted. We built little enclosures around the guitar amps, the bass was DI'ed, as were the electronic keyboards in the room, and the drums had some low baffles with fibreglass tops and a canopy over them. We had no problems with leakage whatsoever."
According to Scheiner, he didn't do anything deliberate to achieve the more hard-hitting sound of the album. "I think a lot of the sound of the album is the room that we recorded in. I didn't set out to do anything different. I simply did what I always do, which is to capture what the musicians are playing. I seldom try to make things sound different from what is played in the recording room. I go for the assumption that the guitar player gets the sound out of his amplifier that he wants. So I go out into the studio and listen to the sounds the guys get, whether guitars or drums, and just try to get that sound. With bass it's a different story, because 50 percent or more of the time you record the bass direct. The same with electric keyboards."
Scheiner adds that he 'seldom' uses EQ during the mix, and that Morph The Cat was recorded via Clinton's Neve 8078 directly to analogue 24-track. Straightforward recording to analogue without much processing is now Fagen's favoured approach, says he. "It's the sound I like. It's not necessary to have the latest equipment. Today I think that I could use any studio, and any equipment, and all I need is good players and it will sound good. I like the sound of jazz records recorded in the late 1950s. I love the sound of Rudy van Gelder's records for Prestige. I can't imagine anything sounding better. Van Gelder's jazz recordings definitely influenced the Steely Dan recording and mixing style."
Three years ago Scheiner, and to a lesser degree Becker, went into fairly great detail about the analogue versus digital debate, while Fagen only let slip that he felt that "digital sound loosens the fillings in your teeth". So three years on, with the dramatically fast developments in digital technology, has anything changed for Scheiner, and how are Fagen's teeth? Did they survive his work on The Nightfly, which was one of the first best-selling albums recorded to digital, and for years a popular demonstration record in hi-fi stores across the globe? Surely it didn't sound that bad? And what does he make of digital today?
"I haven't listened to The Nightfly since I made it," replied Fagen, "but the people in these hi-fi stores must have liked something about it. I think most of the way a record sounds is independent of whether it was recorded digital or analogue. So much has to do with the miking, the material, the studios, and the engineer. Having said that, I do think that digital has improved a lot over the years. It doesn't have that weird scratchy high end any more, and the bass sounds a little better too. But frankly I don't hear that much of a difference between the two media. As long as bass and drums are recorded to analogue you're OK. So we recorded the basic tracks to analogue, and for convenience's sake we loaded them into Pro Tools for overdubbing. To use analogue for overdubbing is just too much of a pain in the ass."
Many would agree with Fagen on these points, but strikingly, Scheiner's attitude appears to have hardened in the last three years. "I don't think digital will ever catch up with analogue," he says uncompromisingly. "Digital is convenient and it is good for doing trench work, but as far as sound is concerned, it's definitely analogue. I recorded the basic tracks to Quantegy GP9 tape, 15ips, +3dB operating level, Dolby SR. All edits on the backing tracks were done in analogue, and we then digitised everything, transferring stuff to Pro Tools HD at 24/96."
Nuendo And The Rest
Given Scheiner's view that "digital will never catch up with analogue", it's a little surprising to see his studio in Connecticut filled to the brim with digital equipment, including a Yamaha DM2000 desk and MSP1 monitors, Alesis HD24, and Steinberg's Nuendo DAW. The producer/engineer states that he went for digital equipment because of economical reasons, but given his preferences the recent acquisition of a Studer A827 24-track was pretty much inevitable. He does, however, wax lyrical about one piece of digital equipment.
"I very much enjoy working on Nuendo. It's probably the best digital workstation available. It is the closest to analogue of any digital equipment I've heard. Nuendo sounds much better than Pro Tools, for instance. The two aren't even on the same page. I don't know why it is, I am just trusting my ears. A friend of mine, Frank Filipetti, did a comparison test between Euphonix, Pro Tools and Nuendo. It was all digital, there was no analogue-to-digital conversion, and Pro Tools did not even compare to the other two.
"I work on Pro Tools in commercial recording studios, but that's because I don't have a choice. I owned a Pro Tools system when it first came out and found the company impossible to deal with. They never returned any phone calls, if you had a problem there was no help. I spent more time rebooting the system than anything else. This is not necessarily Digidesign's fault, it was probably a Mac problem, but as a result I stopped using digital for a few years, until I got into the Nuendo system in 1998 or 99. I don't know whether it is Steinberg, or the combination of Nuendo and the PC I run it on, but so far it has never crashed."
The Finishing Touches
The overdub sessions for Morph The Cat were done by TJ Doherty (who also worked on Everything Must Go) and Brian Montgomery, at Avatar Studios and Sear Sounds in NYC, and Sugar Sound in Kauai, Hawaii, when Fagen visited Becker. Instruments overdubbed included guitar solos, vibes/marimba, harmonica, Fagen's lead vocals, backing vocals, and percussion. At Avatar Scheiner then overdubbed the horns in June and November of 2005, just before mixing, also at Avatar.
"Donald had done his other overdubs there," comments the engineer, "and was comfortable there. They have a Neve VR and all the analogue equipment that we needed, so it made sense to mix there. The mixes went from Pro Tools through the Neve VR and then to two-track half-inch analogue. Since I hardly use EQ during mixing, any EQ that I do will be applied during the mix. So I did some EQ-ing, and added some reverb, using the EMT 140 plates at Avatar, and also a Lexicon 480 and a TC3000. I only used room mics on the drums. I also used a Fairchild 670 on the bass and kick drum. There was no compression during recording."
It appears that mixing is a plug-in-free zone for Scheiner. "Most plug-ins are a joke," he says. "I don't think there's a reverb plug-in that comes close to an EMT 140. A plug-in that claims to make your SM57 sound like a C12 is a load of shit. It just doesn't. The only plug-ins that I use are the Universal Audio emulations of the 1176 and LA2As. And the Nuendo EQ is incredible, I love it."
"The mix was pretty much straight ahead," continues Fagen. "There are a few effects, but overall a little bit of reverb is basically it. When we are mixing, I will go out of the room, and Elliott will set up a basic track mix. I will then come in and do some serious alterations. I usually listen to the mix very carefully. I'll start with the bass and drums. My work is mainly to do with level adjustment, like the balance between kick drum and snare drum. The thing that I'm good at is the balance of instruments, so I will do a lot of that and also adjust vocals EQs, things like that."
Scheiner's version of events complements Fagen's, but there are some differences, suggesting that the engineer should, perhaps, watch his back. "I will normally come in during the morning," says Scheiner, "and get the mix to the point to where I like it. Donald then comes in and he will want to listen to the drums and then the bass and the relationship between them. Maybe the snare needs to be a bit fatter or louder, whatever. We go through this procedure and get a mix going. Donald is pretty focused when we mix, but he never touches the faders. Number one, I won't let him touch the faders, and number two, he knows that he may be deleting information, so he won't want to touch them. If he was actually sitting at the console, and wanted some low end taken off, I don't think he'd know what to reach for."
Is it possible that Fagen sneaks into the control room while Scheiner takes breaks? Whatever way they worked, the end result, Morph The Cat, kicks up a storm. So with Fagen in such barnstorming form these days, also have embarked on his first-ever solo tour, will the wait until his next solo album be relatively brief, or will the gap be as long as that between his previous solo efforts, fast-forwarding us to 2019 or thereabouts? "Probably," laughs the New Yorker, "but whenever it will be, it will be something completely new and it won't be part of this trilogy."
What Rhymes With Orange Alert?
"THIS is my death album," Donald Fagen said in his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. "It's about the death of culture, the death of politics, the beginning of the end of my life." Then he mock-sobbed, "Boo hoo hoo."
Mr. Fagen, best known as the vocalizing half of the rock band Steely Dan, turned 58 years old in January. His new CD, "Morph the Cat," is his first solo album in 13 years, and he's kicking it off with an 18-city concert tour, starting this Wednesday -- his first live shows with his own band ever.
He wrote "Morph the Cat" in the wake of Sept. 11, and it's an album about fellow New Yorkers dealing with the aftershocks -- tales of love and dread in a time of terror.
One of its eight songs, a ballad called "The Night Belongs to Mona" is about a woman who stays cooped up in her Chelsea high-rise. At one point, Mr. Fagen, playing one of Mona's worried friends, sings, "Was it the fire downtown/ that turned her world around?" It's the album's only reference to the World Trade Center. But the attack lingers as a constant backdrop.
"The Great Pagoda of Funn" is about two lovers who stay together as shelter from the world's horrors, itemized by a choir of background singers: "Poison skies/ and severed heads/ and pain and lies "
"I wrote that after several beheadings in Iraq," Mr. Fagen said. "You can thank Mr. Zarqawi for that song."
"Security Joan" is a comic blues about a man who swoons for an airport guard while rushing to catch a plane.
When I felt her wand sweep over me
You know I never felt so clean
Girl you won't find my name on your list
Honey you know I ain't no terrorist
The album's finale, "Mary Shut the Garden Door," sounds like the score for a spooky political thriller. Mr. Fagen's liner notes describe it: "Paranoia blooms when a thuggish cult gains control of the government."
"I wrote that song right after the Republican Convention took over New York," he said. "I'm afraid of religious people in general -- any adult who believes in magic." It's a gloomy number -- the doo-wop background singers chant, "They won/ Storms raged/ Things changed/ Forever" -- but it holds out a thin hope in its last line: "This ballad is for lovers/ with something left to lose."
That's a contrast to the most recent Steely Dan album, 2003's "Everything Must Go." It too was produced in the shadow of 9/11, but it responded to catastrophes with mordant retreat ("the long sad Sunday of the early resigned") or down-with-the-ship partying ("Let's switch off the lights/ and light up all the Luckies/ Crankin' up the afterglow").
All nine Steely Dan albums over the past 34 years -- which Mr. Fagen wrote with Walter Becker, his musical partner since their undergraduate days at Bard College -- dwell to some degree on destruction and doomsday, but usually with black humor or a diffident shrug. "Morph the Cat" has the familiar Steely Dan sound: the dense chords, jazz vamps, laser backbeat, skylark guitar riffs and sly lyrics -- polished narratives of insouciant irony and cryptic allusions -- sung by Mr. Fagen in a nasal troubadour's wail. But this time, he's staring at the darkness with open apprehension.
"Part of the difference," he said, "is that Walter's more snarky than I am. He's more realistic; I'm more of a fantasist, a romantic. Walter has that side, too. But when we write together, we assume this collective guise -- this guy you could call Dan -- who isn't either of us, really. Dan's a much colder dude. Or maybe he just seems cold. Maybe he's afraid to show his emotions; that's more likely."
Cut loose from Dan, Mr. Fagen writes songs that are "more personal," he said, "and, as it turns out, more autobiographical." The keys to this chapter of his chronicle are not just the attack on his city but also the death of his mother, in January 2003, after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease.
"It was a horrible death, very agitated toward the end," he recalled. The album is dedicated to her. "In memory of Elinor Rosenberg Fagen, a k a Ellen Ross," the liner notes read. "Ellen Ross was her stage name," he explained. "She was a professional singer from the age of 5 years to 15. She was the Shirley Temple of the Catskills. Her mother would take her up there in the summers to sing in a hotel. One time, the guy who owned the hotel took her over to an amateur-hour radio show. She had an anxiety attack. That was the end of her career."
While Mr. Fagen was growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, his mother sang show tunes around the house, encouraged him to play piano, and took him into Manhattan on weekends to see Broadway musicals. "I got most of my musical theory from her," he said.
"Morph the Cat" begins with the title song, which sounds like an R. Crumb cartoon theme about a cat named Morph who flies above Manhattan and seeps into apartments, spreading good cheer. But when the tune is reprised at the end of the album, after the songs about severed heads and so forth, Morph (as in Morpheus, god of dreams?) seems more menacing.
"Yeah, the cat is narcotizing the citizens," Mr. Fagen said. "I observe it in people, this mind-death, these layers of brain-washing that's gone on for so many years. It's in the techniques of political machines, the unbelievable stupidity on television." He stopped and raised his eyebrows. "Hey, maybe Morph is television."
Then he backed away, chuckling. "I refuse to take responsibility for any interpretation," he mumbled.
Last week, he was busy rehearsing for his tour. Steely Dan gave up live performance in 1974. "I burned myself out quickly, my voice was getting tired, I was in my mid-20's, my lifestyle wasn't very healthy." Mr. Fagen recalled. After he and Mr. Becker broke up the band in 1980 (a split that lasted 16 years) , "I didn't have the confidence in myself to organize a band and a tour without him."
In the late 80's, he met a producer, Libby Titus, whom he later married. "She was putting together what she called these 'horrid little evenings,' " he said, concerts with several big-name pop singers, performing one after another. Mr. Fagen joined them. At first, he just played piano; then, under her prodding, he sang again, too. "So," he said, "I got back into it a bit."
Still, his element is the studio. Last August, he sat in a booth at Avatar Studios, in Midtown, with his engineer, Elliot Scheiner. Mr. Fagen had spent a year recording the album's tracks. Now it was time to mix them. He and Mr. Becker were notorious perfectionists in mixing the Steely Dan sessions. That part hasn't changed.
"Mmmm, bring the snare down in those two bars by one-tenth," Mr. Fagen said, listening to the rhythm tracks of "Mona." He meant one-tenth of a decibel, a minuscule adjustment in volume.
Later, listening to the horn tracks, he said, "After the first bop-bop, you've got to bring up the da-bop."
Then the vocal tracks. Hearing himself sing the line, "To see how the story ends," he said, "The first syllable of 'story' is a little hard; bring it down two-tenths." Another line, "When you're already dressed in black," was a little soft. "Bring up the whole line one-tenth." He listened again. "Maybe only the end of the line -- "dee dressed in black" -- bring just that up one-tenth."
After five hours mixing, he said, "I'm wearying of this," in a stentorian tone. He got up, stretched, sat down, and went back at it for two more hours.
Soon, Mr. Fagen hopes to remix his previous solo disc, the 1993 "Kamakiriad." His voice on that album was buried: too soft and indistinct. "I was in my self-loathing period," he said.
The remix will be part of a three-disc box-set, which Reprise Records plans to release later this year, of all three Fagen solo albums, starting with "The Nightfly" (1982), his wistful look back at his cold-war adolescence. "I see them as Youth, Middle Age and Death," he said with a crooked smile.
But if "Morph the Cat" is "Death," what will he do for an encore?
In an e-mail note, Mr. Fagen replied, "just one of those cringe-worthy duet albums: you know, me and gwen stefani, me and tony bennett, me and gladys knight also some tricked-up duets with dead people: nat king cole, tiny tim, mae west, etc."
But those aren't booked. What is likely, he said, is another tour with his new band this summer and probably some gigs with his musical companion of youth and middle age, Mr. Becker. Just because you've done death doesn't mean you're done with Dan.
MUSIC Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate.
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