Don’t worry, this is the last Steely Dan post for a while!

Anyway, last time, when I talked about Jeff Porcaro’s drumming on the Steely Dan tune “Your Gold Teeth II,” I remarked how the song is the band’s “most rhythmically adventurous song by a very wide margin.”

It’s more or less true; when I was nabbing Steely Dan tempos at the start of the year, I was a little surprised by how much of the band’s catalog is in 4/4. That’s not unusual — it is called “common time” after all. But there’s a lot of talk about Steely Dan’s songwriting with regard to harmonies (such as the famous “Mu” chord, which is most often an add2 chord in first inversion), so I figured there must be a deep cut with a movement in 5/4 or 7/8. 

Outside of “Your Gold Teeth II,” no such deep cut exists. That being said, there is some time signature trickery throughout the Steely Dan discography, but much of it is actually hard to notice, which has the interesting effect of becoming conspicuous upon further analysis. Allow me to demonstrate!

For one thing, Steely Dan is really good at what I call the “hidden 2/4” — bars of 2/4 that are snuck into songs otherwise in 4/4.

Take the classic “Reelin’ In the Years,” which uses a bar of 2/4 right before each chorus:*

I heard this tune for years before noticing the time signature change. What makes the 2/4 “hidden” is how naturally it flows. I reckon it’s because of the vocal phrase ending in the middle of the bar and the space from the rest of the band on that A chord.

“The Fez” does something similar at the end of the chorus — the syncopated drum fill underneath the held E chord obfuscates where the beat is:

During the intro of “Hey Nineteen,” there’s a bar of 2/4 right before the verse. There’s also a bar of 2/4 at the end of each chorus, over the same chords and “drum” fill; with the progression changing on each half note, these jump out a bit more:

“The Caves of Altamira” is similar. The big dotted 8th stabs from the horns hide the downbeat somewhat:

This tune gets a little spicy after the second chorus, which uses a bar of 9/8:

See how the dotted 8th motif continues through the time signature changes. You can tell that there’s something off about this big ensemble passage, but because dotted 8th rhythms are so common in ’70s funk-adjacent music, it doesn’t sound that off. 

“Dirty Work” has a bar of 2/4 halfway through the verse, but check out the bar of 5/4 right before the hook:

It’s honestly remarkable how well the 5/4 fits in. I think it’s probably a combination of the vocal phrasing and how slow the tempo is, making the extra beat harder to notice. The “crash” on beat 3 also gives the bar a 2+3 feel, which flows a bit better than just 4/4 with an extra quarter note.

Going back to ensemble passages, “Green Earrings” has a bar of 3/4 in the intro, with some big chord hits. Normally, when I spot a time signature change at the beginning of a song, I’m tempted to think I’m starting my counting on the wrong beat.

However, a number of Steely Dan chord charts have found their way into the hands of collectors, so the neat thing about this case is that we can look at page 1 of the original chart to confirm that there is indeed a bar of 3/4.

Those chord hits are also used during the turnaround back into the verse. There’s nothing too subtle about this one — I think the band was having some fun with the listener. 

On the topic of intros specifically, “Deacon Blues” also has a bar of 3/4 in the intro underneath chord changes, and we also have the original chord chart.

Erm… actually, the chart is wrong (and not because the title of the song was misspelled). On the recording, the second bar of Eadd9 is a bar of 2/4, not 4/4. Like this:

Not sure what happened there. It could have been a mistake on the part of the copyist, or perhaps Walter and Donald called an audible and had everyone pencil in the change instead of getting a new chart. In any case, this one is harder to notice than “Green Earrings,” probably because of the lack of any strong pocket.

As far as oddball 3/4 measures go, “Josie” has a pretty famous one after the final chorus, going into the outro. Check out the little solo drum fill:

This is another example of something sounding off, but not that off.

Drummer Jim Keltner talks about that fill in the Modern Drummer article I keep referencing for these Steely Dan posts (November 1992):

As for that fill near the end, it was a bar of 7/8. That’s definitely not something that I would’ve played. That figure was written on the paper, it was totally Fagen’s thing. I wish I could get a copy of that chart. I’ve had more drummers ask me about that lick. I was playing a 5x14 Ludwig Vistalite snare drum, a Super Sensitive — weird instrument.

Although he says it was a bar of 7/8, I am certain it’s 3/4.†

“Aja” has, unsurprisingly, the most going on yet. To start, each chorus has a bar of 3/4 on the line “run to you.” Once more, with no obvious groove, downbeats, or backbeats, it’s hard to notice: 

Moving on to the instrumental sections, there’s a 2/4 bar four measures after the marimba kicks in:

The opening of the guitar solo also has a fourth measure that’s in 2/4, but note the measures of 3/4:

There are actually several ways you could count those three bars: 4/4 + 5/4, 3/4 + 6/4, 3/4 + 4/4 + 2/4, etc. We can’t know for sure without the original chart. Somebody out there owns it!

There’s a bar of 2/4 going into the sax and drum breaks — when I transcribed these sections about five(!) years ago, I just treated these as 2‑beat pickups, but counting out the full phrases beforehand reveals the bar of 2/4. The offbeat 8th note vamp already masks the downbeat, so this is another that’s hard to notice. (One of these days I’ll update my transcription…)

Lastly, there’s another bar of 3/4 towards the end of the track, around the 5:43 mark, going back into the “head.”

So… there you go. Here are some other examples I know of from the Steely Dan discography that are worth checking out (which I also didn’t have the time/energy to notate):

• “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again” (2/4 in the fifth bar of the verse.)
• “Midnite Cruiser” (2/4 before the chorus and after going back into the verse.)
• “Boston Rag” (2/4 towards the end of the chorus.)
• “Kings” (ends with a riff in 5/4.)
• “Kid Charlemagne” (2/4 in the guitar solo.)
• “Everything You Did” (the fourth bar of the guitar solo has a measure of 5/4 on G augmented.)
• “Throw Back the Little Ones” (5/4 in the chorus, over the lyric “squeeze them”; 2/4 in the guitar solo before the horn feature; 2/4 after the horn feature back into the head; 5/4 first bar in the piano outro.)

Whew… this article was a handful. Hope you enjoyed!

* ^ Donald Fagen’s exact vocal rhythm is one of those deliveries that is quite hard to accurately write out. I looked at some other transcriptions, and this is the best that I (or anyone, for that matter) could do, but it doesn’t sound quite right.

† ^ The 3/4 bar is cool and all, but it seems to overshadow that wild 32nd fill beforehand, which took me a good 5 minutes to figure out, and I’m still not sure about it…