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BEST ALBUM EVER: Aja (album)

Aja
Aja album cover.jpg
Studio album by Steely Dan
Released September 23, 1977
Recorded Late 1976–July 1977
Studio
Producers’ Workshop and Sound Labs (Hollywood)
Village Recorder (West Los Angeles)
Warner Bros. (Burbank)
ABC and A&R (New York City)
Genre
Jazz rockyacht rockpop rockjazz
Length 39:51
Label ABC
Producer Gary Katz
Steely Dan chronology
(1976) Aja

Singles from Aja
“Peg”
Released: November 1977
“Deacon Blues”
Released: March 1978
“Josie”
Released: August 1978
Aja (pronounced like Asia) is the sixth studio album by the American jazz rock band Steely Dan. It was released on September 23, 1977, by ABC Records. Recording alongside nearly 40 musicians, band leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players while pursuing longer, more sophisticated compositions and arrangements for the album.

The album peaked at number three on the US charts and number five in the UK, ultimately becoming Steely Dan’s most commercially successful LP. It spawned a number of hit singles, including “Peg”, “Deacon Blues”, and “Josie”.

In July 1978, Aja won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical and received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It has since appeared frequently on professional rankings of the greatest albums, with critics and audiophiles applauding the album’s high production standards. In 2010, the Library of Congress selected the album for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or artistically significant.”