Considering Steely Dan's twenty year absense from the record racks in terms&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Kamakiriad/dp/B000002MIY/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Kamakiriad</a>of new music this album itself not only came as something of a surprise but more over that it won a grammy. Personally I haven't since that time seen an album as fully creatively deserving as this every win such an award. So where were Steely Dan musically at this point anyway? Well as it turns out much in the same concept as Al Green's 21't century comeback they elected to do almost nothing to change their sound and concentrated mainly on new songs. So musically if you are a love  albums such as&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Gaucho/dp/B00004YX39/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Gaucho</a>&nbsp;and Fagan's&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Kamakiriad/dp/B000002MIY/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Kamakiriad</a>&nbsp;you'll love the music here. In the end it's just like with Al;it's a sound that is so wonderful and works so well everytime you'd rather see it used again with some melodic variations here and there than see people like these jump on a shallow flavor of the month trend that will embarrass them. One thing that has expanded to a degree is the lyrical focus. Steely Dan always tended to revel in overly cryptic lyrics that could mean a number of things,usually darkly humorous tales of sociaties misfits and such. By the turn of the millenium not only had the definition for misfit scarily broadened but this gave Becker and Fagan an awful lot of new ground to cover in their songs. Extending upon some of the ideas expresssed on&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Kamakiriad/dp/B000002MIY/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Kamakiriad</a>&nbsp;most of these songs have to do with different types of modern women from the shortlived summer affair of "Gaslighting Abbie",the forbiddan romance of "Janie Runaway",the run down addict of "Negative Girl" and the mecurial and moodswingy sorts featured in "What A Shame About Me" and "Almost Gothic". One of the funkiest tunes on the entire album is "Cousin Dupree",a pretty straight forward tale of a man with impure thoughts about his cousin musing over what would be so wrong about a "good old fasioned family romance". It also has to be one of the only pop songs that uses the word "quid pro quao" in the lyrics. Even though the sound of this album hasn't changed from earlier ones there is more concentration on jazzy chord progressions than outright pop melodies,especially on the title song and "West Of Hollywood". And again that brings to something of a mystery to me how this album not only faired well commercially but won an award. Not that that's what they were going for by any means but the subject matter and musical stylings of this album are a bit too obscure and sometimes very perverse for the usually more childishly explicit "pop" music of it's time but at least I am happy that,at one point someone had the right idea that sometimes,even in an age of a lot of generic things that every so often pop music needs to have it's surprises.