A long-awaited third solo album finds Donald Fagen exploring the romantic edge.

As he walks the corridors of his New York record company—grey sweatshirt, black jeans and white trainers—a strange fact suddenly strikes Donald Fagen: “Nobody here knows who I am.” Twenty somethings with immaculately ruffled hair, shiny new jeans and multi-colored shoes bustle around the office and Fagen, whose band Steely Dan probably sold enough albums to pay the wages of every clone in sight, wanders into a badly lit room and slumps on a sofa.

“I love New York,” the 58-year-old explains of the city outside. “Unfortunately, I’m the only one of my friends who’s made enough money to stay. Most people my age have moved out to the suburbs, at any one time in New York I’m usually the oldest person in the room.”

Fagen has always been the odd one out, proved by his quiet completion of a trilogy of solo albums that started with 1982’s Nightfly. That dealt with his Kennedy era childhood, then the wandering middle-aged tales of 1993’s Kamakiriad followed and now the musings of a man “near the end of his life” are shared in Morph the Cat.

Like his Steely Dan songs that satirized the emerging corporate, self-obsessed ’70s society, Fagen’s new work captures a confusion in the western air. “I find it really hard to make a decision now because it’s tough to know what the truth is anymore,” he explains in his soft, sing-song voice, “It’s really hard to get news anymore. TV news is on 24 hours but I don’t believe what’s on it.

“The New York Times is very suspect and I certainly can’t believe the right-wing sources, can’t believe the left wing either. I don’t see any political candidates who seem to place any kind of premium on the truth.

“I don’t know what to believe.”

That confusion flares through the album, sometimes sinister, sometimes amused at the changing world. “Morph the Cat, flying above the city, started as an anti-9/11 figure, something good to come out of the sky,” he reckons, “but then I realized that it was an ominous figure. I got to the point where I saw him as narcotizing citizens, bringing brain death after all these years of advertising and TV.”

And so the album’s characters have retreated inwards against the horrors of the Noughts. In the “Great Pagoda of Fun,” young lovers shield each other from the “psycho-moms” and “dirty bombs.” Men fall in love with female airport security guards before international flights and Mona shelters in her New York apartment “dancing all alone.” Now everyone is a cynic, once the preserve of Steely Dan in a more innocent age, Fagen seems to have remained the outsider by embracing a romantic distance.

Back in the ‘70s, Fagen and Steely Dan partner Walter Becker hit pay dirt with a series of six peerless albums that invented a new category of pop. They started off as songwriters for ABC Dunhill, East Coast cynics flown out to the LA sun to write tunes for the label’s artists. But so ambitious was their work that the label, in despair, suggested they form their own band. None of their artists could handle the material.

Starting with Can’t Buy a Thrill in 1972, with soulful hit singles “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” Steely Dan mixed radio-friendly, even easy-listening melodic pop with jazz and acerbic lyrics. It was a stark contrast to the earnest singer/songwriter hegemony on the West Coast.

Steely Dan’s work often starts as, for example, conventional love songs usually do, but right up to 2000’s Two Against Nature album, they turned out songs like “Janie Runaway,” where the initially sweet sounding relationship turns out to be between a teenage runaway and a seedy old man. They used novelistic techniques, as did Lou Reed before them, bringing in fictional narrators.

Fagen and Becker had met at college, sharing what Fagen describes as a jazz fan’s sense of humor—apparently embodied by worshipping renegade stand up Lenny Bruce. They liked political humorist Tom Lehrer, another jazz comedian Lord Buckley and of course Frank Zappa.

Fagen cites a 1967 summer residency Zappa held at New York’s Garrick Theatre as a huge influence. He attended the shows religiously and, when he met Becker, discovered that his new partner had done the same.

After 1974’s Pretzel Logic spawned more success with the single “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” Fagen and Becker shed their band and retired from touring, retreating to the studio to hire the best session musicians around.

1977’s opus Aja, regarded as a masterpiece of the period, earned them millions of sales and earned them props from the usually snobby world of jazz. But when Becker’s drug habit got the better of him and his girlfriend overdosed in his New York flat, Fagen’s partner got out of the game for a while and Don made Nightfly to massive critical acclaim, harking back to the jazz he loved as a kid and unearthing some long dormant issues.

Fagen’s outsider status was cemented in childhood.

“I was born in Passaic, New Jersey, an industrial city which was going down the drain even at the time I was born. It was Italians, Jews, Polish, black people, Puerto Ricans, a very rich mix and I liked it there. But my parents struggled through the Depression in Passaic and so my father moved us out to the suburbs when I was 8 or 9. For him it was upwardly mobile, but we ended up in this typical ‘50s housing development which to me was like a prison, I hated it.

“It also moved us away from our large family that we had, we’d see them on Thursday nights. I understand why they wanted to move, they wanted someplace clean with no rats around and all that stuff. But I like the city.”

Morph the Cat is declared “In memory of Elinor Rosenberg Fagen, aka Ellen Ross,” his mother who died in 2003. Fagen’s mother, however, provided some distant promise of glamour in counterpoint to his accountant father.

“She sung from 5 years old until 15,” he relates, “In the summer she performed in the hotels up in the Catskills, like a minor Shirley Temple but she was an excellent singer. She sung around the house and had a good knowledge of swing music and jazz. I got a lot of my musical feeling from her, I wanted to acknowledge that. She was a bobby soxer who used to go see Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, she had all the records that were an influence on me—Count Basie, Peggy Lee, all different stuff.”

With his mother’s feel inherited, Donald first fell for Ray Charles and R&B and then discovered modern jazz and dumped all his pop records on his little sister. Perhaps it was the dislocation or the numbing effect of suburban life (maybe now the “Morph the Cat effect”) but some issue went unresolved.

As Steely Dan evolved, those concerns were buried behind the façade. The real Fagen hid behind the partnership, studio musicians and his work. “I’m lucky in that I didn’t like the way drugs made me feel. I’m not an addictive person, I never liked to drink. But I was basically a workaholic instead. I evaded my own problems by working. addictions. I used to try and get people to come in on Christmas, like, ‘What else are you going to do?’

“I made the Nightfly record and it was hard for me to expose myself on that level. You think, ‘Oh well, it’s just a record,’ but for me, I feel very secure writing with Walter. It’s a collective persona that I hide behind, he shares half the blame. Nightfly was something I did myself on a more personal level—I put my face on the cover and I’m not so good at that kind of thing. People started recognizing me, I had a backlash to that and I had to deal with it.”

Fagen, enjoying the individual acclaim of his life, crashed. He developed writer’s block and, some say, suffered a nervous breakdown.

“I wouldn’t call it so much of a breakdown. I continued working but I didn’t like what I was doing. At the end of the day I’d look at what I’d done and just put my head down on the table and go ‘I hate this.’ I went to a therapist and started doing some different kinds of musical jobs and wrote a column for a magazine for a while. Finally I came out of it.”

The Kamakiriad album explored his return to normality and Walter Becker produced it, precipitating Steely Dan’s reformation for 2000’s Two Against Nature and again for 2003’s Everything Must Go. The former won four Grammys, beating Eminem’s The Marshall Mather’s LP to the best album accolade. Fagen says his solo work is more personal, less funny than the double act vibe that he retains with Becker.

Everything Must Go was a witty attack on corporate culture; Morph the Cat is a formulation of a feeling in the air between liberal reformers—confused by terrorism and the Iraq War, disbelieving of the press and government, whether from the political left or right.

It is the reason Fagen’s friends have headed out of the city, disengaged from their old passions, leaving their friend to wander the metropolis trying to make sense of the media he consumes. Perhaps, he was not made for these times.

“I still listen to the same 40 records I listened to in high school,” he admits, “Occasionally someone will play me something I like, once in a while. A lot of the things that friends recommend sound to me like a watered down version of something from 30 years ago, or I’ve heard it before but better.” He checks himself, “I’ve been a grumpy old man since I was 18.”