(March 2011 update — Greetings Reddit users! Feel free to stick around, just remember to use a coaster.)

Steely Dan consistently suffered from some of the ugliest artwork of the ’70s, but pulled it together for their 1977 hit album, Aja.  This brilliantly simple image belied the alluringly complex music contained within.

The songs on Aja (pronounced Asia) have been dissected and examined countless times over the last 30 years, so I’m giving this great artwork its due.  According to Wikipedia, the name Aja belonged to the Korean wife of Donald Fagen’s friend’s brother.  I’m not sure if that’s true but it sounds plausible, so I’ll pretend it is.

Credit for the cover image goes to Hideki Fujii, who took this striking photo of model/actress Sayoko Yamaguchi.

People found this post by searching for:

"aja album cover", "steely dan aja album cover", "aja cover", "aja steely dan", "steely dan aja", "aja cover art", "steely dan aja cover art", "steely dan album covers"