(I don’t know how to make the above timestamp go away; this is current as of Summer 2023)
QUANTUM CRIMINALS: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay
Like most hardcore Steely Dan aficionados, I usually think anybody else's opinion on Steely Dan is misinformed, poorly considered, or just wrong. So it is with profound surprise, and a mild resentment born of great pleasure, that I must report having found Quantum Criminals fascinating, illuminating, edifying, generally meticulous, and only very occasionally dead wrong. An indispensable volume for anybody who's ever stayed up late obsessing about this most delightful of bands. Don't tell the others I said this.
-- John Darnielle
Steely Dan has always sounded like the future, a phenomenon that makes me want to dissect their past to see how they got there. They're a band with a thousand wormholes, and Alex Pappademas explores every one of them. With luminous illustrations by Joan LeMay, Quantum Criminals is a strange and fascinating love story worthy of the Dan.
-- Aimee Mann
To classify this book asinterestingwould be as reductionist as calling a Steely Dan albumwell-produced. The illustrations are fantastic and the writing is sublime: interpretive portraits of people who don't exist, a deep history of two geniuses impossible to understand, and the sharpest criticism ever published about a catalog of songs that actively defy analysis. A perfect book about perfect music.
-- Chuck Klosterman
The shibboleth of Steely Dan, spelled out across fifty years and nine records, can't be explained or sold: if you know, you know. And if you know rejoice. Quantum Criminals is a fiend folio for Dan freaks, an astonishing, joyous, vibrant book capturing the Becker and Fagan canon of cosmic losers, doomed loners, jazz narcs, and star-bummers, along with half the truth and all the bullshit that makes being into Steely Dan such a delightful, unsolvable puzzle. Alex writes like Iain Sinclair in the streets and Greil Marcus in the sheets; Joan paints like Steve Keene doing a presidential portrait of Maira Kalman. Of course. Who better? Who else? They know, too. Like the man says, if it good to ya, it gotta be good for ya-and this book is very, very good.
-- Matt Fraction
Having made several attempts to concoct a blurb that might display some of the thoughtfulness, cleverness, craft, wit, style, and strong point of view that are the hallmarks both of this book and of the band it so fiercely and fannishly and lovingly analyzes, I'm just going to give up and write the simple truth: I adored it.
-- Michael Chabon