Throughout the 1970s, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wrote dozens of songs that were sketched out as crude piano-and-vocal demos but never completed with a band. Brooklyn-based singer, multi-instrumentalist and Steely Dan biographer Anthony Robustelli has gone through the bootlegs and painstakingly arranged 10 of them as if they were tracks from Gaucho. Alongside a four-piece horn section and two guitarists, Robustelli multitasks impressively on drums, bass and piano, singing in a soulful, nasal whine that’s pitched somewhere between Fagen and early Dan vocalist David Palmer. His arrangements are filled with knowing references, throwing in the odd horn line from Deacon Blues, a Black Friday Wurlitzer riff, or a Do It Again guitar solo. Amid the cryptic lyrics is the poignant A Little Less Sugar, which appears to be poor old Walter Becker’s melancholy meditation on being abandoned by his mother (“All the years that she was with us / You could count them on one hand”).
