Where rents are high and seabirds cry

Kamakiriad still sounds good. My favourite track is still 'On The Dunes' which lingers in a Bill Evans sort of way. The lyrics paint a very Dan world, both exotic and down at heel. While the other tracks have pep 'On The Dunes' pulls the sort of melancholy trick of 'Third World Man' but Steely Dan are never self-pitying which is why after Walter Becker died I could go straight on listening and hey, the remastered iTunes version was going cheap.

In 2006 Donald Fagen looked back on the album from the perspective of what interviewer Chris Rolls called the "final instalment" in Fagen's solo trilogy, Morph The Cat.

"The first album, The Nightfly, was sort of from the point of view of a younger person, maybe an early teenager, and Kamakiriad was… although it had a science fiction framing, it was actually about midlife. And, you know, now I’m 58, so this sort of looks toward the last years of life. But that Kamakiriad, actually the midlife album, ended with — this guy was driving this sort of futuristic car–and ended up about to drive out into the unknown, not knowing where he was going, so it has this kind of suspenseful quality at the end."

Steely Dan had been parked since Gaucho but Kamakiriad was produced by Walter Becker who had moved to Hawaiian island of Haleakala in 1981. Becker spoke to Giles Smith about the Dan and Kamakiriad in 1994:

"It was the Gaucho album that finished us off. We had pursued an idea beyond the point where it was practical. That album took about two years, and we were working on it all of that time - all these endless tracking sessions involving different musicians. It took for ever and it was a very painful process."*

How painful? This painful. Donald Fagen on Gaucho:

"We started using sequencing and stuff on Gaucho out of desperation really. We were having trouble laying down 'Hey Nineteen'. We tried it with two different bands and it still didn't work, so one of us said something like 'It's too bad that we can't get a machine to play the beat we want, with full-frequency drum sounds, and to be able to move the snare drum and kick drum around independently.' Roger [Nichols] replied 'I can do that.' This was back in 1978 or something, so we said 'You can do that???' To which he said 'Yes, all I need is $150,000.' So we gave him the money out of our recording budget, and six weeks later he came in with this machine and that is how it all started. 

"This was in the days when digital was still very primitive ... Roger's machine did not even have any switches, it only had a regular computer keyboard and he had to type all these bytes out, huge lists of numbers, which took him 20 minutes, and at the end he would hit Return, and we heard this one snare a beat. It took so long. It got a little better during The Nightfly, but it was so horrible, I have tried to figure out how to get out of sampling ever since."

Becker in 1993 joked (ha ha) he was going to stay in Hawaii and bunk off the Steely Dan tour:

"It turns out that show business isn't really in my blood anyway, and I'm looking forward to getting back to working on my car ..."

Becker had gone to Hawaii to deal with his "social ills". In 2003 he and Donald Fagen talked to George Varga about living in Hawaii:

Q: You talked about how you left L.A. in '78 and then you wrote about it and when you got here to L.A. in '71 you wrote about New York. I haven't seen anything to overtly reflect the reality of life in Lahaina or Maui in the songs. Is there in fact anything directly or indirectly...? 

BECKER: "Well, a song like 'The Last Mall' is — mall life for Donald is certainly somewhat associated with being in Hawaii. If you live in New York, there are no malls in New York City. And Hawaii, as you know, is kind of a quasi-suburban environment with a few curves thrown in, in the middle of the ocean, as it is. But basically, a lot of this sort of textural stuff of contemporary American life — that non-urban, non-New York, non-L.A. kind of reality — is something that we both see there." 

FAGEN: "It's funny, Hawaii has become kind of a..." 

BECKER: "Middle America." 

FAGEN: "If you need to do research for suburban America, do it in Hawaii. I have occasionally tried to encourage Walter to draw more on the musical environment, but he doesn't seem to have that much interest in it, really." 

BECKER: "Well..." 

FAGEN: "I think you've lived there long enough so that, you know, you could maybe..." 

BECKER: "Well, mostly what happens in Hawaii now is reggae music." 

FAGEN: "Well, I know, but just like we go back into the jazz of the '20s and '30s... 

BECKER: "Yeah. Well, I think it was Groucho Marx said it best: 'All Hawaiian music was recorded on the same day.' That's the thing.