I'm particularly fond of this story. They spent 6 hours working on the words "Well the" for "Home at Last" during the Aja sessions
"We’d be remiss if we didn’t include this anecdote about seasoned studio engineer Lenise Bent, who worked with the band during their Aja sessions. It was the recording of the song “Home at Last” that brought her to a breaking point, due to Fagen and Becker’s insistence on getting two words, two syllables, absolutely perfect. As remembered by Dick LaPalm, Bent’s friend and publicist extraordinaire:
"‘Dick, I have to talk to you.’ She put her head down on the desk in her arms and said, ‘Well-the, well-the, well-the.’ I said, ‘What are you doing?’ Lenise looked up and said, ‘Dick, I have to get off the Aja session. They worked on the words ‘well the’ for six hours last night. All they did was work those two words for just the right sound for hours. I really have to get off the session.’"
https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/steely-dan-stories-of-donald-fagen-and-walter-becker.html
I appreciate the perfectionism to a degree, but anything after Aja is kind of iffy for me, when I feel they started taking it to a pretty absurd degree, at the expense of the human element of musicianship (e.g. that programmed beat on "Hey Nineteen"). I think of recorded music first and foremost as a kind of language, the same way people talk about the "language of film". It's a cultural artifact, with nods to the values of the cultures it comes from. With the later Steely Dan stuff it's almost like they tried creating their own dialect of recorded music that did away with a lot of the language that had come before, all in the name of perfectionism.
IMHO of course