Hey everybody, it's Steely Dan Time!

Again? We hear you ask: So soon? And your confusion is both entertaining and understandable. Steely Dan Time, after all, is that rarest of musical occasions, the one that rolls around immediately after you've given up any hope of another visitation, kind of like Haley's Comet, gauged in glacial motions.

All of which begs the question: Didn't we just have Steely Dan Time?

Yes, Steely Dan Time did indeed last roll around just three short years ago. You remember. Of course you do.

It was in that halcyon millennial spring of 2000, when all the world was humming their favorite selections from Two Against Nature, the duo's first album of new songs in twenty years. There was that fleeting sense of universal brotherhood, four Grammy(tm) awards including Album of the Year and then... the satiated afterglow, the languorous cigarette, the mild depression.

We settled back, got on with our lives and told our children that one day, if they were very good, they too might experience the awe and wonder of SDT.

Now here it is, three years later -- barely a blink in the span of Steely Dan -- and the Time has come around again. Ready or not, Everything Must Go, nine new tracks from the improbably industrious pens of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, has arrived full blown and well ahead of schedule.

"We were on a roll," is the best we get by way of explanation for this dizzying creative tempo: the usual trenchant understatement from Fagen, to which the ever-helpful Becker thoughtfully provides a little context. "Making a record is like a plunge into the abyss. You can't ever seem to quite remember how to do it. It's like starting from scratch each time."

"Of course," Fagen interjects, "once you're done with the record, you can't believe you ever knew how to live a regular life. It's a no-win situation."

It was in that attempt to, for once, win, that the duo decided to get the lead out this time around. That, and the foreshortened window of celebrity that opened briefly with their four Grammy win for Two Against Nature. "The excitement lasted about three days," Fagen recounts. "People were stopping us on the streets. They knew our names, although sometimes they'd get the two of us confused."

"Then it was over," Becker adds, "We were schlubs again. So we figured we might as well get back to work."

Thankfully, the two-decade ramp-up that got them to the multi-platinum plateau of Nature was enough to carry them into the early stages of another record. Unprecedented? Not quite.

"That's how we did it in the Seventies," asserts Becker. "Our recording career had a cumulative effect. We'd solve a bunch of problems with one record and take what we'd learned into the next."

"We were a little rusty with Nature," allows Fagen. "Everything Must Go was an attempt to pick up where we left off without taking an inordinate amount of time."

"Even so," Becker admits, "we still managed to reach the outer limits of the ordinate."

A key to "reeling in" the proceedings was the advent of a steady backing band. "We winnowed them down over years of playing," Fagen explains, "and we achieved a real continuity of groove, a certain economy that had a lot to do with everybody being from New York City. We were all local and available and doing our usual thing."

"It was like a clubhouse," is Becker's description of the mid-town locale where recording proceeded at a deliberate, if unhurried pace through equal halves of '01 and '02. "We even ate the same food."

Live tracking was the order of the day, a quasi-spontaneous enterprise made seamless by the quality of the ensemble: drummer Keith Carlock; keyboardists Ted Baker and Bill Charlap and guitarists Jon Herington and Hugh McCracken.

Becker doubled on bass and guitar, as well as singing on one track and, along with Fagen's trademark blend of Rhodes and vocals, kept all Steeliness intact. "Working with the same band moved things right along," Fagan allows.

"We didn't have to spend a lot of times tricking things up. The group could pretty much do whatever we wanted and that allowed us to set the bar as high as we could."

Does it go without saying that Everything Must Go is absolutely chock-full of quirky turns of phrase, colorful and elusive names for people and places, and all sorts of musical and Iyrical spit-takes of the highest possible sophistication and panache?

It certainly does! Which is a good thing, inasmuch as Becker himself forbids me to quote any of them here, on the curious grounds that this document is a "peri-commercial text instrument" and thus should not contain any "trade secrets". "It's simple," Becker offers, "we don't want to screw our listeners (or ourselves) out of a job."

But rest assured, cognoscenti of Danfolk and Danlore - the ones who hold in their heads the imaginary map of "Danland" and its denizens - will find plenty to chew on here.

Everything Must Go, is in other words, "just a collection of songs," according to Becker, although Fagen will admit to the atmospherics being "a bit heavy on loss."

Which should be as far as any of us are willing to go. This is, after all, Steely Dan Time. What happens was meant to be. Readers who seek biographical information on Steely Dan may find a hyperlinked timeline at: http://steelydan.com/timelinebio.html

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