Alongside them, we present the kind of coverage that these perfectionists deserve: our in-depth reviews of every album by Steely Dan, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. We have selected the best Steely Dan interviews from the archives of NME, Melody Maker and Uncut. Their full story is in to be found in the following pages. It’s a story with the depth of a limited event streaming series: with many players, some deep intrigue, but only two chief architects. While “The Second Arrangement” has supplied a story, it has only fleshed out the feelings of intrigue, entertainment and arched goodwill building on Twitter (inside we catch up with Alex, curator of Twitter’s bodacious aggregation and elsewhere online. With what you might observe as a customary smoothness, ‘Dan momentum has been steadily mounting. In these pages there’s a dive into this and 19 other Dan deep cuts, a new interview with producer/engineer Elliot Scheiner, and insights into the band’s genius from contemporaries including the late David Crosby, who gave one of his last interviews to us about Steely Dan – this having been one of his favourite subjects. “The Second Arrangement” is just one of the topics you’ll be able to read about in this expanded and updated deluxe edition of our Ultimate Music Guide to Steely Dan. Six years after Walter Becker’s death, the Lazarene reappearance of “The Second Arrangement” – a track accidentally erased during the overdub sessions for their Gaucho album from 1980 – has served to remind, or perhaps even notify, a wider audience of Steely Dan’s enduring greatness. That, however, is the state of play in 2023. Even for this wryest of bands, it must be a moment of delightful irony for Steely Dan – that they, the most notorious of all studio perfectionists, should return to the public imagination by virtue of a song which doesn’t appear on any of their albums, and which exists only as a cassette rough mix.

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