If someone asked you how you fell in love with music, how would you respond? Take a moment to think about that before reading on. If you’re at all like me, it will take you three to six months before you have a satisfactory answer. I have pondered and agonized over how best to convey my relationship with music in prose. The idea for Soundtracks came to me months ago. The concept is simple: a series where I explore the effect that various songs and albums have had on my life. Easier said than done, I suppose. In practice, the exercise has been incredibly vexing. Dissecting a song by rhythm, groove, melody, et cetera, and saying what you like is one thing, but how can I describe the spiritual nature of these songs? What effect have they had on my soul? So, after a lengthy period of procrastination, I’m ready to try and describe my musical world to you by drawing connections to scenes in my life, brought to surface by the chord progressions that seem to grip me by the heart whenever they are played.

For those who know me well, my selection for the first Soundtracks entry may surprise you. Though now that I’ve thought about it, it may absolutely not. The album, “Katy Lied,” by Steely Dan hasn’t been in my rotation for upwards of ten or fifteen years, longer than I’ve been playing guitar. “It’s hardly surprising, Ryder, that you’d run into this album as you dive, ever deeper, into the music of the fifties through seventies and beyond. But why, Ryder? When you came across it again, why did it ring between your ears with such familiarity and nostalgia?”

The answer to this question requires you to look back on the evolution of listening technology throughout your life. When you started listening to music, what did you listen with? Maybe it was a tape deck, a gramophone, a record player, a LaserDisc. Make fun of me if you will, but the first bit of tech that I vividly remember listening to music with was a red, AA battery-powered MP3 player that my Dad gave me when he got his first-generation iPod nano. I must have been four or five. It was loaded up with the best of whatever he was listening to at the time, including narration by the “Central Scrutinizer” on Frank Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage,” which was home to the classic songs, “Catholic Girls” and “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?” So, accompanied by Zappa’s raspy toilet humour and sexual innuendo, my musical education was begun by the pleasant noises of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, colloquially known as Steely Dan.

In retrospect, it’s absolutely unsurprising that I was drawn to the songs of Katy Lied. To say nothing of the music, the lyrics painted pictures, left deliciously incomplete for me to digest and deconstruct for meaning. Even at five or six or whatever, I was always interested in the words that people would sing. In my opinion, that was why people would listen to music, for the message underneath. This is largely still the basis on which I listen to music today, but I’ve also realized that you have to put a song on a scale, with lyrics on one side and music on the other. The heavier side is usually the one that the artist wants you to focus on.

On that note, this is also a part of what makes Steely Dan so interesting. While the album grabbed me long before I knew what a major or minor chord was, the music on Katy Lied is both complex and catchy, and I have felt the grooves echoing through me for the better part of my waking life. Whenever I read the track listing on this album, there are a couple of tunes that seem to jump out at me, putting my feet right back into the shoes that made footprints in wet concrete outside my house in Edmonton. The complicated and jazzy tune “Your Gold Teeth II,” theoretically-speaking, is beyond me even now, but even from that young age, the changes that seem to melt throughout the song washed over me, shaping the landscape that my musical world would be built-up on. The chorus on “Rose Darling” tugged at my subconscious for years before it could be brought to the surface again. For me Rose Darling is synonymous with Katy. My young mind made this connection from the tiny screen on that red MP3 player, to where even now I almost think of Rose Darling as a pet name for the album.

Listening to the album now as an adult, I get to notice new things, new similarities between the grooves of the original pressings and the grooves of my own originals as they write themselves today. Literally, right now, as I listen to “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More,” I’m amazed by the bluesiness of the track, and left to wonder whether it has guided me to my bluesier listening habits in Mark Knopfler, Gary Clark Jr., and others. Yet, as I listen to the 12-bar “Chain Lightning,” a pure blues tune, I am also floored by Steely Dan’s spin on the genre. It’s blues, but it’s beyond blues as well, something more beneath the unusual harmonies of the band’s core duo.

I was mildly surprised when the album cover’s ‘katydid’ cricket poked its head through my phone screen as I scrolled through Spotify, deciding what to listen to before I stepped on the gas pedal and rolled out towards my destination that day. But, as soon as I pressed play, I was delighted to be taken right back to the yellow couch where I first pressed play on that red MP3 player years before. After seven-ish years of informal musical education, it’s a real privilege to go back and realize that my taste in music hasn’t changed all that much, to listen again with younger ears, but analyze with a more developed palate.