Last year Steely Dan was my number one artist on Spotify Wrapped. I have spent the better part of two years trying to understand why this music has such a hold on me.

The obvious answer is that the songs feel impossibly good. The grooves are clean without being sterile, the chords keep opening trapdoors under melodies that already seemed complete, and every instrument sounds like it was played by someone who understood exactly how much space it was allowed to take up. Nothing feels accidental. Even the looseness feels engineered.

This is probably why Steely Dan got past my defenses. I am a musician, so I usually hear the music first. I notice the pocket, the chord voicings, the little arrangement choices, the way the bass line moves around the vocal, before I notice what the words are actually doing. Steely Dan is perfect for that kind of listener because the music gives you so much to follow that the lyrics can hide in plain sight.

Then one day the words step forward and you realize the beautiful song you have been enjoying is full of people and places that sound like they were pulled from a sealed deposition.

But plenty of music feels good and eventually wears out. Steely Dan does the opposite. The more familiar the songs become, the less normal they seem. The band sounds smooth, hip, soulful, and locked in. Then Donald Fagen opens his mouth and sounds like a man reading classified documents from a lounge chair.

That is the part I cannot get over.

Sometimes the lyrics almost feel like an afterthought, not because they are careless, but because the music sounds so complete without them. You can imagine Fagen and Becker finishing some flawless groove, standing back from it with complete satisfaction, and then remembering with mild irritation that albums generally require someone to sing. So Fagen walks up to the microphone and starts describing a man no one has ever heard of in a situation no one can verify.

The wrong hotel

A Steely Dan song will be moving with this absurd confidence, the kind of groove that makes you feel like every musician involved has quietly solved a private problem inside rhythm and harmony, and then a phrase appears that seems to have arrived from another legal jurisdiction. "Custerdome." "Doctor Wu." "Jive Miguel." "Deacon Blues." You do not know whether you have missed a plot point or entered the wrong hotel.

The songs never stop to explain. They just keep going.

Fagen and Walter Becker met at Bard College in 1967, which feels almost too perfect. Two bookish New York guys, both into jazz, science fiction, black humor, and difficult novels, find each other at a liberal arts college and eventually decide to make pop music that sounds like session-player heaven while being lyrically populated by creeps, burnouts, mystics, criminals, romantics, and men having complicated feelings in expensive rooms.

Before Steely Dan became Steely Dan, they tried to make it as songwriters in the more ordinary machinery of the music business. They spent time around the Brill Building world, where professional songwriters turned feeling into product with ruthless efficiency. That background matters because Steely Dan songs are not weird because Becker and Fagen lacked craft. They had craft to spare. They knew how songs worked. They just had no apparent interest in making normal ones.

That may be why the music lands so strangely. The songs have the structure and precision of commercial music, but the emotional furniture is all wrong. A normal song gives you a feeling and then supports it. Steely Dan gives you a perfect groove and then lets someone with a suspicious amount of backstory start talking.

The groove gets there first

The first thing you hear is the ease. The rhythm sections are unhurried but never lazy. The guitar solos sound both spontaneous and pre-approved by a very serious committee. The backing vocals enter like someone opening a door onto a better party. The songs feel expensive, not because they sound flashy, but because you can hear how many decisions were made so the final thing would not have to announce them.

That is why the lyrics are so funny when they finally push through. The music sounds like control. The words keep suggesting control is exactly what no one has.

Fagen sings with the calm of someone who has no intention of helping you. Names appear. Places appear. Social arrangements appear that seem to matter a great deal to the people in the song and not at all to the listener's ability to understand what is happening. There are grievances, schemes, old humiliations, women remembered badly, men overestimating themselves, and parties that feel less like parties than depositions with better lighting.

And somehow it is not alienating. It should be, but it is not. The groove gets there first. Your body has already accepted the song before your brain starts filing objections.

This is especially funny because Steely Dan's lyrics are not vague in the normal poetic way. They are often extremely specific. That should clarify things. Instead it usually makes them stranger. "Bodacious cowboys" is not a foggy phrase. It is vivid enough to ruin your afternoon. You can picture the room getting worse the moment it is said. You may not know what it means in any stable way, but you know someone has crossed a line.

The world just outside the song

That is the pleasure of it. The songs keep producing details that feel both exact and untranslatable. They are not nonsense. They are worse than nonsense. They sound like references to a world that does exist, just not one you have been cleared to enter.

A lot of music becomes simpler the more you listen to it. Steely Dan becomes more crowded. At first you hear the groove. Then you hear the chords. Then you start noticing little instrumental decisions tucked into the corners. Then one day a lyric you have heard twenty times suddenly steps forward and you realize the song is much less casual than it seemed. A line that used to pass as atmosphere becomes the whole reason you put the song on again.

That is what makes the music so addictive. It works immediately, but it never quite settles. There is always another layer moving underneath the one you came for. Sometimes the layer is musical. Sometimes it is narrative. Sometimes it is just Donald Fagen saying something so oddly confident that you have to rewind and make sure you heard it correctly.

I also think the songs last because Becker and Fagen do not treat their characters like easy jokes. The people in Steely Dan songs are ridiculous, but they are not thin. They have desires and grudges and self-mythologies. They are often compromised, but they are rarely boring. The music gives them more dignity than they probably deserve, which is part of what makes the whole thing feel human.

There is a strange generosity in that. Not sentimental generosity, exactly. More like the generosity of giving a doomed man the best possible band.

The sentence starts to sound perfect

The result is music that keeps staging the same impossible little argument. The band sounds perfect. The sentence is insane. The groove says everything is fine. The lyric says absolutely not. Neither side wins, which is why the songs keep working. The tension never resolves into a simple joke or a simple feeling. It just keeps moving.

That is the part I think I have been listening to for two years. Not just the musicianship, though the musicianship is unbelievable. Not just the lyrics, though the lyrics are funnier and stranger than almost anyone else's. It is the way the two refuse to become one thing.

Steely Dan makes beauty carry weirdness until the weirdness becomes part of the beauty. After enough listening, the strange sentence does not interrupt the groove anymore. It completes it.

The band sounds perfect. Donald Fagen says something insane. And somehow, by the third listen, the insane thing starts to sound perfect too.