HOFFSTACK PLAYLIST #2 - Donald Fagen, "Snowbound"

It's a kind of pyramid with a human heart beating in an iod grid.

If I’ve timed this correctly it’s reveille, you’ve looked out the window and realized that, unless you want to experience the full Llewyn Davis, you gotta dig out your winter boots before you go to work. It has snowed and, yes, it looks beautiful, but it’s a big pain in the ass.

This is nice until you realize you need to get somewhere. (Image courtesy Unsplash.)

But a snowy morning isn’t always bad. Considering that there are seven days in a week, we in the temperate zones face a 28.5714286% chance of getting hit with the white stuff on a Saturday or Sunday. And unless we’ve got weekend gigs (which has been my fate over the years; not great) or unbreakable plans (why did Cousin Ernestine plan this party in January?!!) there’s the option of just hitting “snooze” on life and letting nature take its course.

South Brunswick’s favorite son, Donald Fagen, has recorded the only anthem I know touching on this phenomenon, and it’s a slowly-paced revelation of laid-back swagger.

Donald Fagen released his second solo record Kamakiriad in 1993, just as I was transforming into a Steely Dan maniac. Up until then I had ignored, perhaps even scorned The Dan. I’d be listening to my classic rock stations (92.3 K-Rock or 102.7 WNEW-FM with equal loyalty) for Led Zeppelin or Van Halen or Jethro Tull and once in a while they’d slip in “Deacon Blues” and I’d think “what the hell is this?!?” (Same as when the Eagles’s “New Kid in Town” would pop up, I suppose.)

But eventually the golden chord progressions of Steely Dan, not to mention their wisely Semitic lyrical positioning, snapped into place. Sadly, I thought, this was another band that broke up before my time. Then Fagen released Kamakiriad (a sci fi concept album no less!) which was produced by the other half of The Dan, Walter Becker. As far as I was concerned, this was a Steely Dan album. The good vibes from making Kamakiriad, however, led to a tour—a tour I saw at Roseland in NYC—and the eventual recording and release of two more actual Steely Dan albums, the Grammy-winning Two Against Nature (a masterpiece) and Everything Must Go (an S-tier masterpiece). Sadly, Becker passed away in 2017.

“Snowbound” is the only track on Kamakiriad that Fagen co-wrote with Becker, a fact I either never knew or forgot until right now. Maybe that’s why it’s my favorite. That and the fact that I sing it every time I wake up to snow, which happens, as indicated above, more than I’d like living in the Northeast.

“Snowbound” was also one of two singles released from the album, with music videos that got plenty of time on VH-1. (Does VH-1 still exist? Do the kids even know about VH-1?) “Tomorrow’s Girls,” a song in which sexy aliens descend from the heavens, featured Rick Moranis, if you can believe such a thing. The one for “Snowbound” was shot in stop motion and was directed by Michel Gondry, years before his first feature films.

The video is incredible, but how anybody at the label thought “yes, this will sell some records” is beyond me.

I don’t really understand the lyrics to “Snowbound.” It’s about how there’s a lot of snow, so we shouldn’t go out—and then the narrator goes out to explore all kinds of stuff, to “heat up these white nights.” Because the album is vaguely sci fi-ish, there’s talk about wearing thermasuits and going to the metroplex, which was especially funny for me when this came out, because I used to work at a Loews movie theater in Central New Jersey which was being shoved into obsolescence due to the opening of a new theater called “The Metroplex.” (Alas, my old place of employ is now a gym.)

“Snowbound” for me, really, is just a vibe. “Today is cancelled, you have permission to be a sloth.” That bass at the beginning (played by Becker) is kinda doing a slow happy dance, excited about the unforeseen development of getting the day off. The Hammond organ represents the last flurries off the leaves. The percussion bells add icicles, the strings are sun rays that will eventually melt this whole thing.

I may not have been planning for this to appear so early on the HOFFSTACK PLAYLIST—I was actually hoping not to have two Boomer rockers in a row—but you can blame the weather.