The Emigration Playlist: 64 years of songs. #11 FM - Steely Dan 1978
1978. I am 16. Why am I not picking Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street , with its immortal sax hook, its nostalgia and melancholy that's still takes you to 1970s London, almost 50 years later? Why not The Doobie Brothers' What a Fool Believes, which is just heartbreaking and feels very personal (the song could have been written about something that literally happened to me in my twenties) and which showcases the voice of the fabulous Michael McDonald? Why not the post-punk, menacing and thunderous, era defining, Because the Night by Patti Smith? What about the Bee Gees' Night Fever, Talking Heads' Take Me To The River, or Blondie's Heart of Glass ? Because it has to be FM by Steely Dan. A song that I have played year after year since I first heard it all those years ago. Which has come to mean something to me. An idea, an ambition. It's ambition that's now in serious jeopardy. I am soon to enter the second half of my sixties and I feel like I may have lost...