The Mock Turtle Song/Steely Dan

The Mock Turtle Song never appeared on a Steely Dan studio album, but they have performed it live and it can be found on a number of compilations of outtake and demos by the duo, including Found Studio Tracks, released in 2007. The lyrics come virtually verbatim from Chapter X of Lewis Carroll's 1865 fantasy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and begin: "Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail"--whiting being a type of fish related to the cod. In the book, they are sung by the Mock Turtle as he and the Gryphon demonstrate for Alice a bizarre dance called the Lobster-Quadrille. (This is normally performed with actual lobsters, but the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon make do.) Fortunately Carroll records Alice's reaction to the performance: "'Thank you, it's a very interesting dance to watch,' said Alice, feeling very glad that it was over at last: 'And I do like that curious song about the whiting!'" (This same passage from Alice provided the title for actress Lilli Palmer's 1975 memoir, Change Lobsters and Dance.)

Home at Last/Steely Dan

The peripatetic hero of Homer's The Odyssey keeps wandering into these pages--first in Suzanne Vega's Calypso, then in Cream's Tales of Brave Ulysses. Now he turns up in Home At Last, from Steely Dan's 1977 album Aja. "The central metaphor was taken from Ulysses' big problem--you know, trying to get back home," says Donald Fagen in the Making of Aja video, describing the song as "a little blues about Ulysses." A reference to the Greek wine retsina adds some local color, and, as in the Cream song, there is an allusion to the Siren episode of The Odyssey, in which the hero has himself tied to the ship's mast to resist being lured to shipwreck by the song of the Sirens: Well the danger on the rocks is surely past/Still I remain tied to the mast/Could it be that I have found my home at last/Home at last. Perhaps it should be called Homer at Last.