Local record store was having a going out of business sale today. Everything in the store for $1. All the bins were super disorganized and you really had to thumb through the inventory to find anything. I got really excited when I spotted the sleeve for Pretzel Logic, but when I picked it up the disc was missing.

Dammit

The disc was gone forever 
Over a long time ago, oh yeah

1. Katy Lied
2. Aja
3. The Royal Scam
4. Gaucho
5. Countdown to Ecstasy
6. Everything Must Go
7. Pretzel Logic
8. Can’t Buy a Thrill
9. Two Against Nature

Is this your own personal preference or how you see them as actually best to worst? For instance, I think Katy Lied is a better album but Countdown to Ectasy is my favorite.

Preference and best are interchangeable to me. I don’t know how to judge a work of art’s quality based on anything other than my own experience and interests.

You'll get there someday.

WTH

Preference and best are interchangeable to me. I don’t know how to judge a work of art’s quality based on anything other than my own experience and interests.

I've been trying to figure out why I have a little more trouble with Two Against Nature than other Dan albums. The songs are there. The sound is there. The virtuosity is there. A lot of it is stuck in my head regularly. But something about it keeps me at arm's length, and I think I've figured out why:

1. "Cousin Dupree" is my least favorite Steely Dan song. It's definitely trademark Dan material, specifically in the vein of "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" - a kind-of gross song about a creepy perv. But it's so much more direct and vivid in its lyrical depictions of the sleaze that I wind up feeling skeeved out listening to it. I appreciate it, specifically in how it relates to the album thematically, but it kinda repulses me.

2. The sequencing. God, THE SEQUENCING! This is what really does it, I think. At its best, this album is the smoothest thing Dan has ever released. It slithers through your ears with liquid grace; cooler and jazzier and slicker than ever. But the album doesn't prime you for that at all by opening with the (musically) upbeat, foot-tapping "Gaslighting Abbie" and "What a Shame About Me". Great songs, no doubt, but an underwhelming way to open an album with compositions as masterfully airy and inventive as "Negative Girl" and "Jack of Speed".

So, with that said, I've been trying out a retracking, and it's been making me see the album in a new light. To the point where I think this incarnation easily ranks among their best work.

1. Jack of Speed
2. Almost Gothic
3. Gaslighting Abbie
4. What a Shame About Me
5. Two Against Nature
6. Janie Runaway
7. Negative Girl
8. West of Hollywood

I feel like I have got about as much as I could from this band for the time being.