Donald Fagen - Cheap Xmas: Donald Fagen Complete (2012) [24bit Official Digital Download]

Cheap Xmas: Donald Fagen Complete is a career-spanning compilation highlighting the undeniable musicianship of the GRAMMY Award-winning voice behind Steely Dan. This five-album set features his critically acclaimed works: The Nightfly, Kamakiriad, Morph The Cat, Sunken Condos and a bonus album of rarities. This is the definitive Fagen collection.

Donald Fagen was one of the two masterminds behind Steely Dan, the seminal jazz-pop band of the '70s. Fagen's solo work has been a continuation of the band's work of the early '80s – carefully constructed and arranged, intricately detailed pop songs that are more substantial than their stylish surface may indicate. His 1982 solo debut, The Nightfly, was the best album he had made in years; it covered the same ground as the last two Steely Dan albums, yet surpassed them in terms of ambition and achievement.
After the success of The Nightfly, Fagen suffered a case of writer's block; for the rest of the decade he contributed music to the occasional film and briefly wrote a column for Premiere magazine in the mid-'80s. In the early '90s, he toured with the New York Rock and Soul Revue as he finished the material for his second album. With his former Steely Dan partner Walter Becker producing, 1993's Kamakiriad sounded like Aja recorded with '90s technology. It had some success on the adult contemporary charts, but it was overshadowed by the duo's decision to re-form Steely Dan and tour for the first time in nearly 20 years; the tour was a massive success. One more album – 2003's Everything Must Go – came out of the reunion before Fagen decided to begin work on his third solo album.
With death as its main theme, Morph the Cat appeared in March 2006. Soon after the album's release, Fagen embarked on his first solo tour. It was the beginning of an extended period of live performances for Fagen. Steely Dan toured several of their classic albums in 2009, by which time Fagen had become a regular at Levon Helm's Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, New York. In 2010, Fagen formed the touring blue-eyed soul revue the Dukes of September with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs. The group had a second tour in 2012, and after its conclusion, Fagen released the lively Sunken Condos, his first album since Morph the Cat.

A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late '50s/early '60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date. Continuing in the smooth pop-jazz mode favored on the final Steely Dan records, The Nightfly is lush and shimmering, produced with cinematic flair by Gary Katz; romanticized but never sentimental, the songs are slices of suburbanite soap opera, tales of space-age hopes (the hit "I.G.Y.") and Cold War fears (the wonderful "The New Frontier," a memoir of fallout-shelter love) crafted with impeccable style and sophistication.

Tracklist:

01 - I.G.Y.
02 - Green Flower Street
03 - Ruby Baby
04 - Maxine
05 - New Frontier
06 - The Nightfly
07 - The Goodbye Look
08 - Walk Between Raindrops

Donald Fagen's second solo album is a song cycle of sorts, following the adventures of an imaginary protagonist as he travels the world in his car, a brand-new Kamakiri. It is an odd concept, and one that is not obvious to the listener, but reflection upon Fagen's liner notes while listening to the album does tend to evoke a vision of a non-apocalyptic near future, where swingers sip cocktails and fresh vegetable juices as they groove to synthesized jazz-rock. Evocative or not, this is not Fagen's best effort. The songs on Kamakiriad are mainly static one-chord vamps, with little of the interesting off-beat hits or chord changes that characterized most of Steely Dan's corpus (although, it must be said, Two Against Nature isn't too far conceptually from what Fagen is doing here). There is a slightly antiseptic feeling to Kamakiriad. Although the drum tracks are not synthesized, they sure sound that way, and even the horns sound electronic at times, a far cry from the lush arrangements of Aja. Another shortcoming of this record is the fact that the verse melodies don't sound very developed. The choruses are as catchy and cryptic as you would expect from Donald Fagen, but the verses are less than memorable. Walter Becker, who produced the record, as well as contributing bass and guitar, also co-wrote "Snowbound." Perhaps not surprisingly, it does the best job at evoking classic Steely Dan. Kamakiriad is pleasant as background music, but in the end it doesn't provide enough interesting moments to rank as a must-have. The static grooves, coupled with the long song lengths, and general lack of dynamic movement makes this record one of the least essential of Fagen's recorded output. However, Steely Dan completists will certainly find enough here to keep them happy.

Tracklist:

01 - Trans-Island Skyway
02 - Countermoon
03 - Springtime
04 - Snowbound
05 - Tomorrow's Girls
06 - Florida Room
07 - On The Dunes
08 - Teahouse On The Tracks

There are no surprises in sound and style on Morph the Cat, Donald Fagen's long-awaited third solo album, nor should any be expected – ever since Steely Dan's 1980 masterwork, Gaucho, his work, either on his own or with longtime collaborator Walter Becker, has been of a piece. Each record has been sleek, sophisticated, and immaculately produced, meticulously recorded and arranged, heavy on groove and mood, which tends to mask the sly wit of the songs. When it works well – as it did on Fagen's peerless 1982 solo debut, The Nightfly, or on Steely Dan's 2001 comeback, Two Against Nature – the results go down smoothly upon first listen and reveal their complexity with each spin; when it doesn't quite succeed – both 1993's Kamakiriad and the Dan's 2003 effort Everything Must Go didn't quite gel – the albums sound good but samey on the surface and don't quite resonate. Morph the Cat belongs in the first group: at first it sounds cozily familiar, almost too familiar, but it digs deep, both as music and song.

Tracklist:

01 - Morph The Cat
02 - H Gang
03 - What I Do
04 - Brite Nitegown
05 - The Great Pagoda Of Funn
06 - Security Joan
07 - The Night Belongs To Mona
08 - Mary Shut The Garden Door
09 - Morph The Cat (Reprise)

The nine tracks on Sunken Condos were co-produced by Michael Leonhart and Donald. All but one track, an Ashkenazi recasting of Isaac Hayes' "Out of the Ghetto," are Fagen originals. Some familiar names from the Steely Dan family of players are on hand (Jon Herington, the Steely Dan horns, Freddie Washington) plus some new faces. The word is that, from now on, everything Donald does has got to be funky.

Tracklist:

01 - Slinky Thing
02 - I'm Not The Same Without You
03 - Memorabilia
04 - Weather In My Head
05 - The New Breed
06 - Out Of The Ghetto
07 - Miss Marlene
08 - Good Stuff
09 - Planet D'Rhonda




Tracklist:

01 - Rhymes
02 - Big Noise New York (Demo)
03 - True Companion (Soundtrack Version)
04 - Confide In Me (Demo)
05 - Blue Lou (from Glengarry Glenn Ross)
06 - Shanghai Confidential
07 - Green Flower Street (Live at the Beacon)
08 - Century's End
09 - Hank's Pad (Live)
10 - Viva Viva Rock 'N' Roll (Live)


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