(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Andy (6tee-zeven)
Sat 17 January 2026 21:10, UK
It’s a lofty thing to claim that anyone could match, let alone beat, The Beatles, who, in under a decade, didn’t just evolve endlessly as a group, morphing from thing to thing with baffling speed, changing music history over and over. However, to Joni Mitchell and Aimee Mann, there was another unit that matched them in that regard, and it’s a divisive one.
There are certain bands that have a huge and looming impact on music and culture, but still can’t win over everybody; thus, when it comes to Steely Dan, there is undeniably an element where the band failed to ever really break through into the realm of cool. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are respected and beloved, earning themselves a huge fan base and building a decade-spanning career that still holds onto a mass of fans. Still, somehow, neither of them ever really entered the league of legends that people revere for effortless energy, their style, their cool.
Does that matter though? In such cases, one wonders how to measure the worth of a band, and whether it is in their energy and reputation, or whether it is simply all in the music. For Mann and Mitchell, if it all came down to the latter, Steely Dan would be the rulers of the big leagues, rivalling The Beatles as they both truly believe that the music matches up.
It was Mann who first made that bold comparison, saying, “They’re the American Beatles”. Given the obvious differences in the two bands’ music, and given the looming impact of the Fab Four, it raised some eyebrows, but for Mann, it’s all about their boldness and evolution.
“They coined a musical genre that hadn’t existed before,” she explained, seeing The Beatles’ pioneering spirit, and finding it in Steely Dan too.
Attempting to sum up the Fab Four’s genre evolution succinctly is almost impossible, as within only a few years, they mastered rock and roll, blues, and folk. They harnessed elements of Indian classical music, arguably invented punk, dabbled in sonic performance art and spiralled into the psychedelic world, doing it all, and doing it well, and in a lot of cases, they also did it before everyone else, leaving the rest of the world to follow suit.
Mann saw that same spirit in Steely Dan as she said, “Yes, it’s sort of a mixture of rock and jazz, but the way in which those two elements were combined was completely unique to them”.
Talking to Uncut, she continued her strong praise for the band, adding, “To have the musical facility to put beautiful melodies on top of unlikely chord changes, with such well-written lyrics about really broken, sad subjects, and to create a whole new sound with a really idiosyncratic vocal, that’s the whole package,” declaring, “They invented a new thing.”
Mann is firmly in the cult of die-hard Steely Dan fans, and Joni Mitchell is right there too, who, as an icon, took to her platform and demanded more attention for what she thought was the band’s masterpiece: Gaucho. Coming right after their critically acclaimed record Aja, she felt people had got distracted and clouded, noting, “I never understood why Gaucho didn’t receive the critical acclaim of Aja. I’m convinced that if Gaucho had come first and then Aja, the same thing would have happened in reverse.”
To her, it was symptomatic of a lazy industry: “To maintain this high standard of musicality and storytelling through two projects is most praiseworthy, but there is something ignorant and arbitrary in rock journalism, editorial policy maybe, like, ‘We were kind last time, let’s kill ’em this time!’” she said, outraged at the overlooking of what she saw as a masterpiece.
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