Geddy Lee Details Rush’s Lifelong Admiration for Steely Dan’s ‘Impossible’ Fusion of Complexity and Commercial Appeal

Rush and Steely Dan share a paradoxical kinship: they have nothing and everything in common. Both bands specialized in technically daunting recordings that inspire envy among musicians, and both penned seminal tracks dissecting suburban emptiness—Rush’s “Subdivisions” and Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” Their lyrics stood as anomalously cerebral outliers in rock, though through vastly different lenses; Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s chess metaphor in “Dirty Work” (“like a castle in its corner in a medieval game”) could easily have sprung from Neil Peart’s pen. Where Rush pursued progressive adventures in time signatures and song architecture, Steely Dan wedged dense jazz harmonies into pop frameworks. And while Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Peart performed every note on their records, Becker and Fagen eventually built their reputation on recruiting world-class session players.

As it turns out, Geddy Lee is “a huge fan of Steely Dan,” the frontman and bassist revealed in a newly released interview from Rolling Stone’s recent cover-story sessions. “I almost named my daughter Aja after that record,” Lee said. “I love that record so much. I wore it out.”

New touring drummer Anika Nilles cites a deep admiration for the late Jeff Porcaro, who contributed to three Steely Dan albums, including Katy Lied. Guitarist Alex Lifeson, meanwhile, singles out another key Dan collaborator, guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. “Has there been anybody more versatile than Skunk?” Lifeson asks. “So many styles in his playing, and intelligence.”

Lee points to one of the band’s signature achievements. “What amazed me about Steely Dan was how commercial they were,” he says. “At the same time, just fucking really complex and interesting, you know? They were the exception that proves the rule, whatever that expression is. They were able to be challenging, to think like jazz artists, and yet produce music that was easily consumed. That’s a kind of amazing feat.” Rush similarly distilled their epic tendencies into tighter songs starting in the Eighties, though Lee jokes the shift wasn’t drastic: “from 14 minutes to seven.”

There is no evidence, however, that Fagen or Becker—who died in 2017—ever publicly commented on Rush’s music. They did, however, discuss progressive rock, including Yes, one of Rush’s most direct influences—and their assessment was dismissive. “The more complex groups like Yes, or Jethro Tull or Emerson Lake & Palmer are… interesting,” Becker told Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth in April 1974. (Rush’s debut had been out for barely a month, and they were still playing with drummer John Rutsey.) “But I’ve yet to hear one of those groups that seemed to have developed into anything more than quick changes and super niceties.”

“Yes is a very polished group, but I don’t particularly like their music,” Fagen added at the time. “Their music doesn’t seem to hold together. We might be prejudiced because we like short songs and they like long songs. It has a sort of artificial sound, though, like it was put together deliberately to appear complicated. A lot of those groups seem to me as if they picked up on Frank Zappa many years ago. Zappa puts a lot of complex things together which probably don’t make much sense but he looks at it with such a comical eye, and the English bands don’t think it’s funny. They take it very seriously.”

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