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 my own small, personal American dream. That's to drive on Highway 1 on the Californian coast with the top down and FM on the music system. As a trans woman I am now effectively unable to visit the United States any more. To do so would require me to complete my ESTA visa-waiver using details of my assigned birth sex. I could be arrested in the US if I didn't. As these details do not match my passport, or any other item of identification I own, I wouldn't be let onto a plane. Even if I did somehow get on to a flight, the idea of spending any time in the US (even in the 'safe' states), with the possibility of tangling with federal authorities at an airport or anywhere else, as a trans woman (travelling on an ESTA that didn't match my ID documents) and an 'alien', fills me with dread. And that's without even starting on the anti-Trump rants that Rubio's goons on the border might find on my social media...

It's all a bit sad. Did you know that trans people in my situation have effectively been banned from entering the United States? If you're cisgender, probably not. I have been to the US maybe six or seven times, both pre and post transition, and I have had the best time there. Boston, Buffalo, San Francisco, LA, Detroit, Chicago and Seattle. There's nowhere on earth like New York City. Plus I've hung out with friends on the Missouri/Arkansas border, a great trip.

Will I ever get back? I just don't know. Not until Trump and everything he stood for is long dead I guess. May that be soon.

The song holds out hope. As long as I keep listening to FM, I can keep hoping, keep picturing it in my head. Because it has without doubt the coolest West Coast energy. Poised, polished, perfect control, not a note out of place, it never appeared on an album but was written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker for a movie about a local radio station trying to take on the big corporates. Ironic - Steely Dan were soaked in ironic - that the song is itself is so manicured and expensive-sounding, crafted to the max. It won a Grammy for sound engineering and no-one was surprised. FM purrs, like a sleek, well maintained roadster glued to the bends as it approaches Big Sur with the sun dropping into the Pacific...at least till the bluesy Pete Christlieb tenor sax solo suddenly shakes things loose at the end. 

I am a massive Steely Dan fan. Always have been. I sometimes reflect that as a teenager, I was listening to The Damned, The Pretenders, The Stranglers, Siouxsie and the Banshees...and Steely Dan? Well yes. You'll see them again in this list later. They were just so well put together, a band that was known for an obsessive attention to detail that would see them hire the best session musicians in the world to lay down an album track on Day 1, decide they weren't good enough, fire them all, and hire another bunch of the best session musicians in the world for Day 2. They were the Swiss Watch of Hip, nothing was left unpolished, their music fitted together beautifully. And the lyrics were part of it too. Often cynical, cutting, layered, they took aim at the culture that bought their records, whilst rejoicing in it. They were completely American, and I have all their albums still. 

I saw them live once, in Birmingham, England, in 2009. They had a huge band with them, all note, tone and timbre perfect. It was like being in a recording studio. They played FM as part of the encore. It was deliciously exact. Just thrilling.

Maybe one day I'll get back to California and get behind the wheel? Maybe America will return from the abyss?

Until then, I have the song. 

Enjoy this fantastic, extended, version...

Readying myself for emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html