It looked for quite some time the legacy of Steely Dan would be confined to the '70s, a decade their music helped define. Who could ever have expected that they'd make a grand return, sounding eerily the same as they did in their heyday, to enchant and mystify the new millennium as they'd done the previous one.
That's just what Donald Fagen and Walter Becker managed to do with their 2000 album Two Against Nature. Sounding as if they'd been cryogenically frozen for two decades to ensure that they'd know nothing of the music of the new era, they wound up with an album every bit as decadent and degenerate as their classics.
After setting the standard for studio-based, meticulous jazz-rock wizardry throughout the '70s (a standard nobody else even tried to meet), Steely Dan shuffled off the music scene following the release of Gaucho in 1980. For quite some time by then, the "band" really had only consisted of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the founding duo who wrote all the songs and enlisted the best studio musicians to help realize them.
Fagen and Becker didn't really have a huge falling-out to cause the hiatus, but rather just needed time to get away from the pressurized environment they themselves had fostered as the ultimate perfectionists. They were writing together by the second half of the decade (although nothing came of these sessions).
By the '90s, they were producing each other's albums and touring together, eventually under the Steely Dan moniker. Considering they hadn't toured all that much during their classic run of the '70s, this was a welcome turn of events for the Dan faithful. Another record, however, seemed too much to ask.
But Fagen and Becker decided, if they were going to keep playing live, they'd like some new material to change things up. Working in typically deliberate fashion, they wrote and recorded Two Against Nature over a period of three years, once again using the cream of the crop of musicians to make it happen.
The album won major accolades upon its release in 2000. Of course, not even the most diehard Steely Dan aficionados would have predicted a Grammy win for Album of the Year for Two Against Nature, especially considering it went up against monumental albums from Eminem and Radiohead.
Two Against Nature proved Fagen and Becker's favored approach still held surprises, even though they hadn't altered it at all. Take a listen to the title track with its restless polyrhythms, or the controlled frenzy of the instrumental attack on "West of Hollywood," and it's clear this duo was finding new nuances within their fastidious tendencies.
The lyrics represented the passage of time more than the music did. "What a Shame About Me" presents a middle-aged guy who understands his weaknesses far more clearly than his would-be paramour does. "Cousin Dupree" puts an unforgiving spotlight on a guy who tries to romance a family member, only to get dressed down for the weary architecture of your soul.
Elsewhere, the band conjures up one of those noirish character sketches about a person who seems ready to do no good, to the point where the "Jack of Speed" might even be Kid Charlemagne's nephew. They even proved ahead of their time on "Gaslighting Annie," working that phrase into their tale years before it became a hot term.
The album probably ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack in the Steely Dan catalog, which is high praise. (For comparison, its songs are much more memorable than those on Everything Must Go, its 2003 follow-up). The bottom line: With Fagen and Becker at the helm working overtime to get every sound in its right place, Two Against Nature demonstrates that nature never had a chance.