Credit: Far Out / Rhino Entertainment
Sun 24 May 2026 22:15, UK
While his voice would eventually become a staple and an integral part of Steely Dan’s sound, Donald Fagen began his career with the band as perhaps one of the most reluctant vocalists of all time.
Terrified at the prospect of singing live, something that he and his primary partner in the band, Walter Becker, thought that they would never be asked to do in the first place, they rushed to recruit a lead vocalist for their debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, to take the pressure off Fagen from being the only voice in the band.
Unfortunately for them, David Palmer, whose lead vocals can be heard on ‘Dirty Work’ and ‘Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)’, and shared on ‘Change of the Guard’ and ‘Turn That Heartbeat Over Again’, was never able to commit fully to the role. While drummer Jim Hodder also assumed duties on one track, Fagen is the one who ended up taking on the vast majority of the vocals across the album’s ten tracks, and in the long run, that was probably for the best.
Fagen would then become the sole voice of the band, much to his own disbelief, but it was so essential to the band expanding on their sound and making everything sound uniform. Having multiple different vocalists would probably still have served them well, and it would certainly have taken the pressure off of Fagen, who evidently didn’t have the same level of confidence in his vocal abilities as he did in his musicianship.
However, despite offering his smooth jazz style to the overwhelming majority of the band’s work, it was an R&B-influenced singer from the 1960s who Fagen declared to be one of his favourites of all time, with it not only serving as an inspiration to his own approach, but also as a nostalgia trip for Fagen every time he heard his voice.
“John Sebastian is a singer I’ve always liked,” he stated during a 1982 appearance on Capital Radio, referring to the lead vocalist of the much-maligned Greenwich Village outfit The Lovin’ Spoonful. “There’s something about his voice that’s always been very attractive to me — a charming sound.”
While Fagen admitted to never having seen them during their active years, with the group having sadly met their demise in 1968 after just four years together, transforming themselves from an R&B group into early pioneers of the folk rock movement, he proclaimed that there was something special about Sebastian’s style that got to him on an emotional level.
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‘He’s done music for films,” Fagen continued. “He still does some occasionally, and whenever I hear his voice in films, it always brings me back to those days when I used to hear him on the radio.”
Sebastian’s vocal chops were certainly sublime, and he was very unfortunate not to have had the level of career that Fagen and Steely Dan had. However, while they weren’t celebrated anywhere near enough at the time, he’s still responsible for some of the best cult classics of the 1960s, and a totally understandable influence on Fagen, who aimed to take his early blues influences and mutate them into something mellower and pop-driven.
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