Donald Fagen

Steely Dan is an American rock band founded in 1971 in New York by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Initially the band had a stable lineup, but in 1974, Becker and Fagen retired from live performances to become a studio-only band, opting to record with a revolving cast of session musicians. Rolling Stone has called them "the perfect musical antiheroes for the seventies". Becker and Fagen played together in a variety of bands from their time together studying at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. They later moved to Los Angeles, gathered a band of musicians, and began recording albums. Their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill, established a template for their career, blending elements of rock, jazz, Latin music, R&B, blues and sophisticated studio production with cryptic and ironic lyrics. The band enjoyed critical and commercial success through seven studio albums, peaking with their top-selling album Aja, released in 1977. After the group disbanded in 1981, Becker and Fagen worked sporadically on solo projects through the 1980s, though a cult following remained devoted to the group's work. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steely_Dan) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode)