Steely Dan's 12 greatest songs

10. "Dirty Work" from Can't Buy a Thrill (1972)

Here’s the thing about Donald Fagen’s singing. There are some people who prefer fingernails on a blackboard. I am not one of those people obviously, but I get it. Fagen has a bit of a high whine. There are some rough edges. I think it lends character to many of their best songs. Others disagree.

I do agree that one of the problems with Dan’s later, pristine, meandering jazz explorations is that Fagen doesn’t have the voice to sing them. “Peg” would have sounded better coming from a more traditional vocalist with a smoother delivery.

Why all this talk about Donald Fagen? Because “Dirty Work” is the one song on my list that he didn’t sing. David Palmer sang it. Palmer is not a great singer either, but he does well with this because it’s a very good song and he doesn’t get in its way. It has some early jazzy touches with a sax and flugelhorn providing atmosphere. And it has Fagen’s jagged background vocals adding some bite on the chorus.

The band made the right call in moving away from Palmer, but I sometimes wonder what some of those later, jazzier albums would have sounded like if they had brought him back to sing a few of the songs.

11. “Do It Again” from Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972)

“Do It Again” was the first Steely Dan song most fans heard. It was the first track from the first album, and it was released as their first single (if you discount the non-album single “Dallas,” which failed to chart.) From its opening percussive shuffle and the interplay of Fagen's subtly propulsive keyboards and multiple guitar flourishes, the song is instantly hypnotic.

Fagen tells stories in many of his songs, and this one hints at a classic western – a trope they would return to in “With a Gun” from Pretzel Logic. This was a high point for Denny Dias, whose oddly syncopated sitar solo announced that this band didn’t sound like any others at the time.