Yikes. This record is nearly twenty years old. Funny how time slips away.

Every decade for thirty years, Donald Fagen released a bit of a masterpiece. First, The Nightfly in 1982, Kamakiriad in 1993, and Morph the Cat in 2006. The H Gang swings, don’t it? And it’s a wonderful little flash fiction story.

Those three records form a trilogy. They’re a life’s work, in a way. The Nightfly is about being young and full of beans. Kamakiriad is about being midde-aged. Morph the Cat is about getting older and staring death in the face. There’s a song on Morph called “Brite Nightgown”, for instance. It’s about brushes with death, at least as far as anything Fagen writes is directly about anything.

What a marvelous magpie Fagen is. Picks up all sorts of odds and ends wherever he finds them. “The man in the bright nightgown” is an expression coined by W.C. Fields, of all people, to refer to the Grim Reaper. Donald has a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from Bard College, but you don’t learn stuff like that in school.

I remember that the expression was used to great effect in a superb movie about a play, or a play about a play, or a movie about a play that never becomes a play, or some such thing, you figure it out for yourself, called Barrymore.

What do you do when you’ve already done everything? Beats me. It’s apparently no fun waiting around for the man in the bright nightgown, though.