The Second Arrangement

Somebody mentioned in a thread below that LGM is falling down on the job by not having a thread about the newly discovered Steely Dan song, The Second Arrangement. The story of its rediscovery is pretty interesting:

A new Gaucho song is out, there’s a mutiny going on in Russia, and the year is somehow not 1980. Time is a social construct, man. More than four decades after being feared forever lost owing to a studio technician error, Steely Dan’s “The Second Arrangement” has surfaced in high-fidelity glory. The Expanding Dan Substack reports that Roger Nichols, one of the band’s longtime engineers, made a rough mix of the track on a cassette tape during the 1979 recording sessions prior to its accidental erasure. This tape was unearthed by Nichols’s daughter, who received confirmation from band advisers that this version of “The Second Arrangement” was indeed the “original recording of the song in its nearly finished form.” The digital audiotape clocks in at five minutes and 46 seconds — perhaps it would’ve been a fittingly louche side-one closer after “Glamour Profession” — and here’s a taste of how the chorus goes.

I don’t know what it is about Steely Dan that makes people reach for the word louche . . . wait a second, I do:

The girl in Hey Nineteen is now 63, which is one of the more depressing calculations you can make, if you’re 63, like a certain blogger I know.