Way back when in ’67

The saddest line in “Hey Nineteen” is also the funniest: “that’s ’Retha Franklin — she don’t remember the Queen of Soul.” A man still dining out on his fraternity glory of 1967 tries to charm a girl of nineteen and discovers they have no shared language at all. Steely Dan wrapped the whole quiet humiliation in a groove so plush it went top ten anyway.

It sits on Gaucho (1980), their seventh album and the last before Becker and Fagen went quiet for over a decade — a record they famously sanded down to a gleam, with Walter Becker on both bass and guitar and nothing landing a fraction of a beat wrong. The masterstroke is the bridge, where the singing stops entirely and the seduction shrinks to a deadpan spoken inventory: “the Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian.” It’s the sound of a man who has run out of things to say and knows it. The groove glides on regardless, gorgeous and indifferent, like the decade he can’t get back.