Backstage with…Donald Fagen

Time Out New York: You’re about to release your third solo album, Morph the Cat. What can you accomplish on your own that you can’t with Steely Dan?

Donald Fagen: Well, the solo records are quasi-autobiographical. Steely Dan has to do more with this collective persona that Walter [Becker] and I have developed over the years, where each song has this character that I act out. [My albums] have a persona that’s not exactly me either, but the quality is different. Basically, Steely Dan is “guys without girls.” We both have families, but when we get together, it’s definitely more adolescent.

TONY: The title track of the new record describes a “vast, ghostly cat-thing” flying over New York City. What’s that all about?

DF: I had written all the tunes and I was looking for something to tie the album together. I was reading a commentary on the Ravel piano piece Gaspard de la nuit, and I came across this image of a phantom cat that descended over Paris. So I thought that would be great, this cat that drifted over Manhattan and peeked in people’s windows. Originally, it was kind of an anti-9/11 image, wherein something really big would come out of the sky and make everybody feel good. But I realized that if something actually made you feel that good, there’d probably be a price to pay eventually.

TONY: Do you always feel obligated to address the dark side of an issue?

DF: That’s the way my mind usually works: If I think of something positive, my mind immediately boomerangs back to the negative. Actually, some shrink once tried to get me to do some kind of visualization exercise, one of these things where you’re in a beautiful air balloon floating over the French countryside. And naturally, in my mind this little rocket came along and burst the balloon and I went plunging to the earth.

TONY: Are any of your songs optimistic?

DF: I think they’re all optimistic in the sense that I wrote a song. In other words, if I didn’t write any songs, that would really be pessimistic. The fact that I wrote the song and took time to do the arrangement, got the musicians to show up on time, arranged to pay them somehow, went out on tour, played for people, charged money and stuff like that—that’s really optimistic.

TONY: Even so, there’s plenty of apocalyptic imagery on this record. Since Morph is your first solo release since September 11, did the attacks inform your writing?

DF: I was uptown, where I live, and it was horrible, a life-changing experience for anyone who was in the city. But as a baby boomer, I was born into paranoia. When I was in school, twice a week you had to get under your desk for these air-raid drills—I used to think about the camouflage suit that I would wear and the tools I would have on my utility belt. So actually, this is a fairly calm period: In those days there was going to be a global hydrogen war; now you just have to worry about an occasional city being incinerated.—Hank Shteamer

Donald Fagen performs at North Fork Friday 3 and Beacon Theatre Tuesday 7. Morph the Cat comes out March 14.