For today’s classic song of the day, we turn to one of my favorite Steely Dan albums. Released in March of 1975, Katy Lied contained a virtual cornucopia of catchy, well-crafted pop songs, all with some sort of sophisticated twist that you might expect from the Donald Fagen and Walter Baker.
By Katy Lied, Becker and Fagen had given up all pretense of Steely Dan being an actual band with regular members. Instead, they wrote their songs and enlisted a small army of the best studio musicians from both coasts to record them. That was certainly the case with “Rose Darling,” today’s classic song of the day.
The musicians Becker and Fagen used on “Rose Darling” included Dean Parks on lead guitar, Hugh McCracken on rhythm guitar, Michael Omartian on keyboards, Victor Feldman on percussion, and Jeff Porcaro on drums. Donald Fagen sang lead and supplied some additional keyboards, Walter Becker played bass, and friend of the band Michael McDonald provided background vocals.
“Rose Darling” is as close as Becker and Fagen ever came to writing a love song—although, on closer inspection it may be more of a lust song. Just read between the lines of these lyrics:
Rose darling come to me
Snake Mary’s gone to bed
All our steaming sounds of love
Cannot disturb her in her night
Or raise her sleeping head
All I ask of you
Is make my wildest dreams come true
No one sees and no one knows
Rose darling come to me
Snake Mary dreams along
I would guess she’s in Detroit
With lots of money in the bank
Although I could be wrong
You must know it’s right
The spoor is on the wind tonight
You won’t feel it till it grows
Rose darling my friend
With only you and what I’ve found
We’ll wear the weary hours down
I mean, there’s the obvious (“steaming sounds of love”) and the less so (“the spoor is on the wind tonight”) and the giggling teen boyish (“you won’t feel it till it grows”). Still, for the Dan, this is romantic.
(Or maybe not. Some wags have speculated that “Rose Darling” might be about masturbation. It’s always hard to tell with these guys.)
Musically, it’s more complex than early Dan and much less complex than the later Dan of Royal Scam and Aja, just what you’d expect from a middle-period Dan album. Let’s look at the chorus, which goes:
Gm7 – C – FMaj7 – Bb – Asus4 – G – A -Bm – A/B – E – C – D – G – D/F# – Em7 – G/A – F – D
The song is supposedly in the key of D but you can’t tell it from this section, which kind of sort of appears to be in F, at least for a little bit, then it might drift back into D. There’s an interesting circle of fifths bit in the first four chords (Gm7 serves is the fifth of C, which is the fifth of FMaj7, which is the fifth of Bb) which leads to some interesting vocal harmonies. Then there’s a nifty little walkdown in the bass at the end which actually does somehow lead us back to D. It’s wonderful stuff all packed into a three-minute country-flavored pop song.
It’s one of the best songs on an album full of great songs. It holds its own amongst stellar tracks like “Black Friday,” “Bad Sneakers,” “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More,” “Doctor Wu,” “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” and “Any World (That I’m Welcome To).” I’ve previously featured several of these as classic songs of the day, and justifiably so. They are terrific tunes on an album that more than holds its own more than fifty years after it first hit the shelves—and my turntable.
