With a certain inevitability we come to Steely Dan itself, via their 1974 third album, Pretzel Logic:
It's a monochrome album cover, so I went with a monochrome shot. There's nothing about this record I don't love. I bought it in Bridgend over Christmas 1985, along with The Royal Scam and The Nightfly. My journey down the Steely Dan rabbit hole had begun a few months earlier, when I bought a double cassette of their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill (1972), paired with their sixth, Aja (1977). It's a really weird pairing that ought not to work - the two records really don't sound that much alike - but perhaps it was that odd juxtaposition that worked for me. CBAT has a couple of familiar hits on it, but while the playing is great and the lyrics super-cynical, it's closer to a laid-back Eagles or Doobie Brothers kind of sound than the ice-cool jazz-rock of their late-70s records such as Aja. Pretzel Logic is somewhere in the middle, with the jazz stuff starting to peak through but not yet becoming the dominant sound. The title track is a monumental slow blues that might be about time travel (or something). Most SD albums had a nod to science fiction somewhere or other - Fagen & Becker were big SF-heads.
I love all their 70s records unreservedly. I think I skew a little bit toward liking the later albums - Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho - very slightly more than their predecessors (it might have something to do with Larry Carlton's quicksilver guitar work figuring on those later records) but I would never want to be without any of the records. Through thick and thin, through deviations into prog, punk, post-punk, goth, grunge, metal and just about any sub-genre of rock you care to name, I've never stopped loving Steely Dan. You either got them or you didn't. The only problem was - as of the point I discovered them - their body of work was small, and you could burn through it in a morning. I was conscious of this as I worked through their back catalogue, and by the time I got to Gaucho (1980), which I delayed buying as long as possible, I knew there could be no more Steely Dan. Well, there was, eventually, but for me the two albums they did after 2000 stand apart from the great run of their first seven records.
https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990
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