Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Steely Dan thrived in the age of the greatest hits compilation, and the band’s 1978 Greatest Hits collected most of the band’s popular singles on two LPs. In fact, it was so successful that after the band went inactive in 1981, MCA Records released another collection, Gold, which padded out their remaining hits with deep cuts.
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“King of the World,” a driving track from the lowest-selling album of Steely Dan’s original run, 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy, doesn’t really belong on an entry-level hits compilation, but there it was on Gold. And since a cassette with Pretzel Logic on one side and Gold on the other was in constant rotation in my father’s car throughout my adolescence, that song became an object of fascination to me, particularly once I began to listen to it in its original context as Countdown’s closing track. “If I stay inside, I might live ’til Saturday,” Donald Fagen sings as our narrator in a dystopian Texas where flowers no longer grow after a bomb left a hole in the ground.
“We wrote it after watching Ray Milland in Panic in Year Zero,” Walter Becker told NME’s Wayne Robins in a 1974 interview, referencing the 1962 sci-fi film about surviving the radioactive fallout of an atomic war. In true Steely Dan fashion, though, “King of the World” portrays doom with beauty and panache, with Jeff “Skunk” Baxter raining gorgeous pedal steel guitar countermelodies over the second verse and the band throwing a tricky extra half measure into the final chorus.
“King of the World” is the most overtly apocalyptic lyric in the Steely Dan catalog, but in their 2023 book Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay argued that it’s part of a recurring theme for the band. “Even in the songs that didn’t openly invoke the visions of world destruction that had shadowed their youth, Donald and Walter seemed to be writing about a different kind of apocalypse, a world where the apocalypse had in some spiritual or interpersonal if not global way already happened.”
In 2013, Steely Dan performed “King of the World” for the first time in nearly four decades. One major Steely Dan fan, British singer-songwriter Joe Jackson, put his own spin on the song in a concert recorded for his 2000 album Summer in the City: Live in New York.
Three more essential Steely Dan deep cuts:
“Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)”
Steely Dan’s original lineup featured a second vocalist, David Palmer, who sang lead on most songs in their early concerts and two tracks on the band’s 1972 debut Can’t Buy A Thrill. One of those songs, “Dirty Work,” has become a ubiquitous pop culture staple, constantly popping up in films and TV series. The other, decidedly more obscure song “Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)” is a tunefully verbose ode to envy. Palmer went on to record three albums with the band Wha-Koo and co-wrote Carole King’s hits “Jazzman” and “Nightingale.”
“Any World (That I’m Welcome To)”
Michael McDonald played keyboards for Steely Dan on tour in the mid-’70s before joining the Doobie Brothers and eventually becoming a solo star. He continued lending vocal harmonies to many Steely Dan studio tracks, though, including the soulful Katy Lied standout “Any World (That I’m Welcome To).”
“Aja”
The eight-minute title track from 1977’s Aja is Steely Dan’s most ambitious jazz fusion epic, with a legendary drum solo by Steve Gadd.
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