Pixeleen

I've always heard this as a story about a jailbait girl with serious gamer talent (e.g., she's played some difficult game "three times perfect"). During her gaming sessions, while she's wearing imaginary sexy outfits and blowing away anime bad guys, she keeps getting interrupted by her dad about her curfew, or by her obligatory (but third-rate) boyfriend, to whom she responds typically as the petulant teeny-bopper she actually is.

Wanting to get away from her humdrum existence, she tries seducing the older-man narrator "in the room above her garage," as if she really is the sophisticated, mature person she believes herself to be from her video games, hoping that he will "take her away from all this" kid stuff. (That's not a lyric quote, just a cultural one.)

The narrator rejects her, saying that all he sees is "a girl in girly trouble," someone who would be given a "gun and tambourine" in a music video (a classic musician's insult: the tambourine is traditionally what you give the "hot chick" you want to have appear on stage with your band, but who has absolutely zero actual talent).

In the last verse, all the imaginary backstory elements are swapped around in a nonsensical mishmash, reiterating that this girl's imaginary persona is meaningless, and nothing like her real-life one.

OMG, I'm the first person to comment? This is a good song! oh, well. i think it's about the life of a video game character who goes on action adventures. That's not a lot of info on the song, so others should add.

I saw her as a girl in a video actually.

One of my new favorites due to Carolyn Leonhart's gorgeous vocals.

This is definately Lara Croft...but Becker and Fagen don't sound real happy about the fact that movies are being made about video characters...

Soaked through on the floor of a noodle shop Penned by a hack in the Palisades Backed by some guys from Columbia Shot all in digital video For a million and change Born on the floor of a noodle shop Dropped in the bogs of Jersey Shot by a guy from Columbia Soaked through all in digital video Girl with the sweet backstory Pitched in a trailer in Burbank Cast by a cool-enough yes-man Screened at a festival in Utah

Wow that is a finger to hollywood and one too to NJ...and bad movie production... but I do have a cool new nickname for my wingman... Abu

If anything, I think the song is about a Mary Sue futuristic teen-spy character in an amateur cheap film/script. The narrator is the writer who goes to Japan to pitch it, but loses it on the streets of Tokyo in a street noodle shop. Eventually, the test footage/script gets found, picked up, and re-filmed to be an actual low-budget movie, or a pilot episode.

Yeah same DarkMousy... but I think he's falling in love with the video game character...

Became my favorite song of the two post-reunion albums. To me, this is reminiscent in perspective to Haitian Divorce, with a cinematic/script-like feel to the writing.

The first verse/chorus combo details the germination of this character. This is open for interpretation, but I can imagine that Pixeleen is the idea of a 16 year old female artist who's imagined herself as a teenage action hero. Her father wonders what she's drawing while at dinner and she explains her idea. He laughs it off, she gets mad and tosses her work on the floor of the "noodle shop."

So later a budding screenwriter happens upon this sketch when he goes to pick up his dinner. He takes this idea, comes up with his own storyline, and pitches it to a studio as a potential feature film. These older men take the innocent idea and inject "sexiness" into her character, in order to sell on the big screen.

In the bridge, the boundary between reality and fiction dissolves, as the character herself speaks to this "hack." She laments that she used to have character, but that she's been sterilized by people who want her to make them money instead of having true meaning. A film critic who has seen a private screening then pans it for that exact reason.

The final chorus condenses the entire chronology into 8 lines, in the wonderfully-sardonic fashion we've come to expect from Fagen and Becker.

There are two things for me that stand out about this song: First, the vocals of Carolyn Leonhart, and second, the understated grand piano by Bill Charlap.

Bought this album (CD) in 2003. Loved this song from day one. Interesting melody - very. And the girl - with the alternate melody - most excellent. And the harmonies. Love it.

So fast forward to 2013 - I actually read the lyrics 2nite; never could understand what they were singing about when I'd listened to the song for the last 10 yrs in the car. What a surprise!!! It's kind of a joke? Geeeez - had no idea what this song was about.

I'm the epitome of - "listen to the tune and the way the words sound with the music - who cares what they're singing about!" Basically I never know what they're singing about. In fact - there was a 70s song "I saw your face and that's the last I seen of...." I had been singing "...MY HORSE". So I asked my better half - what did that poor man do such that his girl wouldn't let him hang out with his horse anymore? She said "WHAT?". So I jumped back into the ongoing chorus "...I saw your face and that's the last I seen of my horse!" HOLEY MOLEY girlfriend laughed her aysss off. OMG - it was 2012 when I finally learned HORSE is not a word in that song. So 36 yrs I been singing the wrong lyric there?

Point is - if I could mess up that simple song from 1976, how in hell could I ever be expected to make sense of all that's going on in Pixeleen?

Seems like a parody of the cyberpunk genre's obsession with a spin-off of the "manic pixie dream girl" (with mini-glocks) trope. You'll encounter this cringy character in Snow Crash, Burning Chrome, etc.

Maybe it's the musical theater coming out in me, but I always heard this one as a kind of story song. There are these internal rules to Steely Dan songs, specifically, the men are always losers, even when things are going relatively well, and the women are always dangerous in some way. In this one, I think we have a Dan-typical loser guy, specifically a game programmer or comic book author type, who creates a spy adventure game fantasy girl partly for fanservice reasons ("just a flash of spectacular thigh") and partly based on a girl he loved and lost. ("Flash back to cool summer nights/Freddy can we cut to the chase?/In the room above your garage")

As the song goes on, though, his creation begins to take on a life of her own, and the featured female vocalist goes from mere backing to a full-on character. The line "Everything about me is different" is where Pixeleen stops being a mere fantasy based on a former girlfriend with spy/adventure tropes thrown in. The game-dev guy's hacky plot about "Her cellphone rings/It's like, her stupid father/Be in the door by ten, again" was foreshadowing all along. The former girlfriend's inspiration and his creativity have produced an A.I. teen dream, a fantasy icon beloved in games, movies and more, who is, by the last stanza, off to conquer more than her creator 'father' ever imagined.

The women are always dangerous. The men are always losers.

And what's harder to lose than your little girl, even when she's a Galatea-style videogame super-spy? It's at once deliciously interesting and kind of heartbreaking, the shift from salacious fantasy thoughts to protective, fatherly ones that happen across the song. The snarky college guys from Bard have grown up a lot.