This is a common condition among Danfans, as is his tendency to venture occasionally into the wilds of interpretation.
No fewer than five times does he deem a song a “winner” another he introduces as a composition “regarded by many as their worst, although I like it a great deal.” Indeed, he seems never to have heard a Steely Dan–related recording he didn’t like. Though at least by avocation a critic, Rowden approaches this endeavor in a spirit of near-pure enthusiasm.
TOUCH ME ALL NIGHT LONG SERIES
Jez Rowden includes that fact in Steely Dan: Every Album, Every Song, a volume of Sonicbond’s “On Track” series from 2019, whose charge is to provide brief descriptions and assessments of every album and song recorded by the act in question. “Gaslighting Abbie” alone required 26 straight eight-hour days in the studio to get right. But I was, at least, in the right place: a university-district high-end stereo shop, the kind of audiophile’s sacred space that has provided countless “Danfans” their first proper experience of the band - that is, of the band’s records, played back on a sound system of high enough fidelity to do justice to the enormously costly, complex, and time-consuming labors of recording and production that went into them. It was then that I first heard the word myself, in the context of a Steely Dan song from 2000, “Gaslighting Abbie.” Not only did I have no idea what it meant, I had only the vaguest sense of who Steely Dan were.
THE TERM “GASLIGHTING” has returned to the popular lexicon over the past decade, when as recently as the turn of the millennium it had fallen into near-complete disuse.