A different take on Steely Dan

Today's platter of choice...

...is an album of Steely Dan songs sung by two Swedish women with minimal accompaniment – mostly piano.

It’s this:

It’s called ‘Fire in the Hole’ and it’s by Sara Isaksson and Rebecka Törnqvist – although they don’t look like the cover seems to suggest they do.

Here they are:

That’s better, isn’t it?

Here’s the Dan songs they cover:

• Rose Darling
• Barrytown
• Gaucho
• Green Earrings
• Your Gold Teeth
• Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)
• Don’t Take Me Alive
• Josie
• Do It Again
• Fire In The Hole
• Pearl Of The Quarter
• Midnite Cruiser

What surprised me was that if someone asked me to list a dozen Dan songs I’d like to hear covers of, very few of the above would have made it to my list.

However, Isaksson and Törnqvist make the songs their own, and, with minimal accompaniment, the songs are stripped down to the essentials – melody, harmonies and chord changes – and then sung in such a way that each one becomes a small jewel of dazzlingly radiant beauty, that keeps the best of each composition and then allows you to look at it in a slightly different way.

They’ve made me aware of subtleties in songs that I very often skip through when listening to the original albums on which the tunes appeared. I just know that I revisit the Dan versions with fresh ears now.

Their voices are simultaneously plaintive, vulnerable and sensuous but with an inner strength that supports a format of basically two female voices and an acoustic piano.

Yes, there are other instruments – occasionally you’ll hear a mandolin, a sax, a clarinet, an acoustic guitar, a synth, an electric piano or a kick drum – but it’s basically kept very simple and these other instruments just used for texture and seasoning.

Even the voices reinforce this simplicity, with solo and unison singing used when appropriate, and so the glorious harmony sections are made to really stand out .

Some of the instrumental lines – such as the guitar figure in ‘Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)’ – get sung in a vaguely ‘scat’ way, although what could have been a ‘jazz’ album gets elevated to a sort of a melodic purity by dint of the clarity of the singing and an overriding urge to display the inner lyricism of the tunes.

Hell, if you don't like the Dan, you might just like this, with almost everything stripped away except the melody and harmonies.

It’s an absolutely fantastic piece of work.