EVERYTHING MUST GO

Everything Must Go did not receive as much critical acclaim as Two Against Nature, but it still meets the high Steely Dan standard. As with Aja, Becker and Fagen had the difficult task of creating a followup album. And as with Gaucho, Everything Must Go sounds similar to Two Against Nature, but it's not just the same. In fact, Everything Must Go is a bit of a cross between Steely Dan's more recent sound and the sound of their earliest albums. Walter Becker resumes the bass for most of the songs here. The song lyrics are heavy with the Steely Dan acerbic wit and social criticism. (This was an important element of prog rock coming out of the 1960s, combining rock music with classic, jazz and folk, and including social criticism in the lyrics.) The promo video for the album shows Becker and Fagen tripping around Las Vegas in a taxi picking up hookers and discussing music and life with them -- nothing sordid. This is apparently in homage to the group's name, and the cover photo of hookers on the first album, Can't Buy A Thrill. The titles of the two albums also connect. Becker and Fagen have been busy since the Steely Dan reunion in the early 1990s. Aside from recording and touring as Steely Dan, both have recorded solo albums since Everything Must Go, Fagen's Morph The Cat and Becker's more recent Circus Money. If you like the Steely Dan sound you'll like these solo albums too. They are, again, similar but not the same.