Walter Becker (left) and Donald Fagen.

Steely Dan is a band that has taken an unusual career trajectory. During much of its life, it has not even been a band in the usual sense of the word.  Steely Dan is essentially Donald Fagen and Walter Becker; students who met at Bard College in New York during the late 1960s. After working as songwriters at the Brill Building and later for ABC/Dunhill Records in Los Angeles, the two formed a band and released their first album, Can't Buy A Thrill, in 1972. Although a couple of tracks from the album charted, the group was already on a non-commercial path that would take them in a different direction. After touring for a few years the original band broke apart and beginning with the album Pretzel Logic in 1974, Steely Dan became a studio group in which Fagen and Becker would surround themselves with top New York and LA jazz musicians to create complex, sophisticated songs that often had abstract, puzzling lyrics.

A recurrent theme in their songs concerns people on the fringes of society; so-called losers, sometimes with self-destructive tendencies. This theme is evident in songs such as “Midnite Cruiser,” "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," “Any World,” “Barrytown,” “Deacon Blues,” Don’t Take Me Alive,” “What A Shame About Me,” and “Things I Miss the Most.”

The song “Deacon Blues” from the album Aja, released in 1977, is a good example:

You call me a fool you say it’s a crazy scheme. This one’s for real I already bought the dream So useless to ask me why, throw a kiss and say goodbye. I’ll make it this time I’m ready to cross that fine line.

Learn to work the saxaphone I’ll play just what I feel. Drink Scotch whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel. They got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose. They call Alabama the crimson tide call me deacon blues.

Most of Steely Dan’s songs have a first person perspective but “Barrytown,” from  Pretzel Logic has a third person viewpoint:

I'm not one to look behind I know that times must change.
But over there in Barrytown they do things very strange.
Though you're not my enemy, I'd like things like they used to be.
And though you'd like some company, I'm standing by myself.
Go play with someone else.