What a wonderful evening of music at the Citi Center (a/k/a the Wang Theatre)! I’d never seen Steely Dan so I was particularly excited about this show.

The opening act was Deep Blue Organ Trio and they are terrific! The trio consists of organ (obviously), drums and guitar. They only played three numbers for 15 minutes – it’s rare that you wish the opener played a longer set, but many of us wished they had. I’m looking forward to seeing them do their own show sometime.

After a short break, Steely Dan took the stage, starting with the band which is known as The Bipolar Allstars. They played for a few minutes before Donald Fagen and Walter Becker took the stage with the backing singers, The Borderline Brats. This tour is called Mood Swings: 8 Miles to Pancake Day. Are you sensing a theme here?

On this night, they played their ‘Aja’ album in full, from start to finish. It was interesting staging – they had a turntable and one of the singers placed the album on it. As she ‘turned it on,’ the band started playing. The day prior to the show was the 35th anniversary of the release of the album, so it was especially poignant that it was the playlist of this show. yes, the singer flipped the album when the first side ended!

From there, they launched into various big hits and deeper cuts. Fagen did most of the singing, although he turned the mic over to Becker for ‘Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City’ toward the end of the set. Becker stayed out of the lights for more than half the show, but finally stepped up to the mic and chatted with us for a bit.

My favorite song of the night might have been ‘Reelin’ in the Years’… Well, maybe ‘Deacon Blues’…  Well, maybe all of them!  All songs were wonderful.

I was transported to my teens and 20s which is always a good thing. One of my friends, who’s seen the Dan five times, thought last night’s show was the best he’s seen. Another friend used the word phenomenal!

All in all, a very special evening.