By: Gary Graff
10/9/2012
Steely Dan's Donald Fagen releases his fourth solo album, "Sunken Condos," today (Tuesday, October 9) -- his first set under his own name since wrapping up an initial trilogy of interconnected albums with 2006's "Morph the Cat."
Fagen was working on the "Sunken Condos" material during the past few years when he was also on the road with Steely Dan, and he tells us some of them could well have become fodder for a new group album rather than a solo project if partner Walter Becker had been interested:
"I don't know if I thought about it that much because I know Walter was involved in his own solo project for part of the time, so...I just started writing songs...I suppose if Walter had said, 'Oh, I'm ready to record' or something like that, you know, as would usually happen over the years, I would say, 'Well, I got a few things that you might want to work on.”'
“So, yeah, I might have shuffled some of those half-finished tunes over to him and we would have worked on them together...It turned out he was busy doing other things and so on, and so I kept them all."
Fagen co-produced "Sunken Condos" with Steely Dan trumpeter Michael Leonhart.
Fagen -- who's currently on the road with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald in their Dukes Of September band -- is considering playing solo dates to promote the album but has not announced any yet.
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