Donald Fagen

Of his ten planets, four sit in earth signs, three in fire, three in air and not one in water. Earth builds and air arranges; the element that would register how any of it feels is missing entirely, which is a striking allocation in a songwriter. Fagen played in Steely Dan, and the record names The Nightfly as the record he made on his own.

The Sun, the Moon and Mercury all sit inside twelve degrees of Capricorn, three planets in the sign that works to a plan and counts what it costs. Identity, private feeling and speech all answering to the same exacting instruction describes somebody for whom a song is a thing to be built to a specification rather than confessed. Venus answers from Aquarius, which stands outside the room and describes it.

A mystic rectangle holds Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, and a yod holds Mercury, Saturn and Uranus without resolving, so Saturn and Uranus appear in both. Venus sits directly opposite Saturn at half a degree, what he values against the planet of limit, and Mercury sits at an awkward angle to Uranus at two thirds. Four of the ten planets were retrograde at his birth. In a songwriter, limit and the break appearing in both figures is the structure a deliberately exact record gets built inside.

Jupiter stood again on its Sagittarius birth degree on 23 September 2019, at seventy one. Sagittarius asks how far from home the thing got, and five circuits precede it, which few charts live to collect. For a record that names a band and one album made away from it, distance from home is the measure it already uses. Three planets in Capricorn and nothing at all in water is the chart of somebody who built records rather than poured them out. His Moon sits square Neptune at a third of a degree, which keeps private feeling slightly at odds with the planet of image, and in a songwriter working in a deliberately polished form that friction is the useful part. Saturn and Uranus appearing in both named figures makes limit and the break the two planets this whole chart is organised around.