Katy Lied

The album cover features a picture of a katydid, a "singing" (stridulating) insect related to crickets and grasshoppers. This is a pun on the album's title, which is paraphrased from a line of "Doctor Wu": "Katy lies, you can see it in her eyes".

The track "Black Friday", which was released as the first single from the album, relates the story of a crooked speculator who makes his fortune and absconds to Australia. Muswellbrook, a town in New South Wales, was chosen to fit in with the lyric, as Fagen later explained: "It was the place most far away from LA we could think of ... and, of course it fitted the metre of the song and rhymed with book". The track features Michael Omartian on piano and David Paich on Hohner electric piano.[3]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
Chicago Tribune	[5]
Christgau's Record Guide	A–[6]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[7]
The Great Rock Discography	8/10[8]
MusicHound Rock	4/5[9]
Pitchfork	9.1/10[10]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[11]
Tom Hull – on the Web	A[12]

Reviewing for The Village Voice in 1975, Robert Christgau said Katy Lied may be Steely Dan's "biggest" album, but he found it "slightly disappointing" on a musical level, citing the loss of lead guitarist Skunk Baxter and what he perceived as "cool, cerebral, one-dimensional" jazz guitar influences. He nonetheless admitted to playing the record frequently[13] and named it the third best album of the year for the 1975 Pazz & Jop critics poll,[14] where it finished sixth best.[15] John Mendelsohn was more critical in Rolling Stone, believing that "however immaculately tasteful and intelligent" Steely Dan's music may be in theory, it did not register with him emotionally and remained "exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock". Mendelsohn found the lyrics interesting but inscrutable, the musicianship tasteful and well-performed but not stimulating, and Fagen's singing unique-sounding but seemingly passionless.[16]

Katy Lied was later called "anonymous, absolutely impeccable swing-pop" by Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe, who observed "no cheap displays of human emotion",[17] while Travis Elborough felt it was not on par with 1974's Pretzel Logic or 1977's Aja "but up there as jazz rock staples go".[18] Stephen Thomas Erlewine deemed it a more refined version of Pretzel Logic and "another excellent record" from Steely Dan in his retrospective review for AllMusic.[4] In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Rob Sheffield said the album completed a 1970s trilogy of albums, starting with Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), that was "a rock version of Chinatown, a film noir tour of L.A.'s decadent losers, showbiz kids, and razor boys".[11] Jazz historian Ted Gioia cites it as an example of Steely Dan "proving that pop-rock could equally benefit from a healthy dose of jazz" during their original tenure, which coincided with a period when rock musicians frequently experimented with jazz idioms and techniques.[19]

All tracks are written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

Album[1]

Pop Singles

• Katy Lied at Discogs (list of releases)
• Complete lyrics