Donald fagen wife illness
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Donald Jay Fagen (born January 10, 1948) is an American musician and songwriter, best known as the co-founder, lead singer, and the principal songwriter (along with partner Walter Becker) of Steely Dan.
Fagen is known for his use of complex jazz harmonies, elaborate arrangements, and exacting attention to detail and launched his successful, if sporadic solo career in 1982.
Fagen penned a group of songs based on his experiences as a young man in 1950's America, and the resulting album, The Nightfly, was released in 1982, and is one of the first albums to be recorded entirely digitally. The album has been certified platinum by the RIAA. After a quiet time musically (he is reported to have suffered from writers block) for the rest of the 80s he returned in 1993 with Kamakiriad, which is a conceptual album based on a car journey. The album was produced by Walter Becker and represented the first collaboration between the two since Gaucho.
This collaboration reignited Steely Dan and they released two more albums, the Grammy award winning "Two Against Nature" in
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Face It: Your Hero Is a Grumpy Old Man
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Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen writes a portrait of the artist as a grumpy old man.
By Seth Stevenson
Illustration by Peter Bagge
Late last summer, I noticed that Donald Fagen—one half of the 1970s fusion-rock duo Steely Dan—was playing at the Beacon Theater in New York. I bought a pair of tickets and invited my friend Pete. Pete had first turned me on to the delights of the Dan—the complex harmonies, the precise musicianship, the world-weary lyrics—our freshman year of high school. Somehow, the group’s portraits of slit-eyed urban drifters struck a chord with a pair of apple-cheeked AP students. I’m pretty sure Pete and I listened to the Dan together, with great ceremony, the first time we both smoked weed.
Fagen was on tour as part of the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue—an occasional, mildly depressing project in which he and fellow jazz-inflected rockers Boz Scaggs and Michael
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Donald Jay Fagen is an American musician best known as the co-founder, lead singer, co-songwriter, and keyboardist of the band Steely Dan, formed in the early 1970s with musical partner Walter Becker. In addition to his work with Steely Dan, Fagen has released four solo albums, beginning with The Nightfly in 1982, which was nominated for seven Grammys. In 2001, Fagen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Steely Dan.
Fagen was born in Passaic, New Jersey in 1948. Fagen became interested in rock and rhythm and blues (R&B) in the late 1950s. The first record he bought was "Reelin' and Rockin' " by Chuck Berry. At age eleven, a cousin recommended jazz music and Fagen went to the Newport Jazz Festival, becoming what he called a "jazz snob": "I lost interest in rock 'n' roll and started developing an anti-social personality."
In the early 1960s, beginning at age twelve, he often went to the Village Vanguard, where he was particularly impressed by Earl Hines, Willie "The
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