Deacon Blues

The harmony of 'Deacon Blues' reflects Becker and Fagen's jazz background more directly than almost any other track on Aja. Extended seventh chords over a slow, swinging groove place the song closer to a late-1950s West Coast jazz ballad than to blues-based rock. Larry Carlton's voicings, derived from Fagen's demos, give the song its lush suspended quality, and the seven-minute runtime allows the harmony to breathe without chasing resolution — an apt formal choice for a narrator who has stopped chasing anything at all. Note: specific chord voicings are inferred from training knowledge and should be treated as approximations.

Becker and Fagen wrote 'Deacon Blues' in 1976, largely at Fagen's house in Malibu. The song grew from Fagen's observation that if the University of Alabama football team could call themselves the Crimson Tide, the nerds and outsiders of the world deserved an equally grand name. The title was lifted from football player Deacon Jones — Fagen liked the two-syllable weight, mirroring 'Crimson' — but changed to Deacon Blues to avoid legal trouble. Fagen later cited Norman Mailer's essay 'The White Negro' as a template for the narrator: the alienated suburban kid who bets that mastering bebop will unlock an authentic life.

Written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen in 1976, 'Deacon Blues' is the emotional spine of Steely Dan's Aja — a widescreen portrait of the self-styled outsider who trades suburban comfort for jazz and whiskey. Released as a single in 1978, it reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 without conceding a note of its seven-minute runtime. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 214 on their 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.