Steely Dan - Gaucho (2023 Remaster)

Fagen and Becker followed Aja with another Top 10 album, 1980's Gaucho. The song "Hey Nineteen" gave Steely Dan their biggest hit in six years! The album also features the other big single "Time Out of Mind", which featured Mark Knopfler.

The sessions for Gaucho represent the band's typical penchant for studio perfectionism and obsessive recording technique. To record the album, the band used at least 42 different musicians, spent over a year in the studio, and far exceeded the original monetary advance given by the record label.

The multi-platinum success of Aja made Steely Dan, the musical conceit of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, a household name. But that prosperity came bundled with a fateful triple-whammy for rock's dyspeptic duo: unrealistic commercial expectations, a critical backlash spawned by punk's nascent mewling, and the long-simmering meltdown of their artistic partnership. But the cool, perfect sheen of 1980's Gaucho tipped its hand to none of it. Ironically, those fashion victims who sniffed up their sleeves at Don and Walt's decadence-tinged Me Decade manifesto couldn't have had a clue that just maybe their songs' typically oblique protagonists had uncomfortably blurred from the third person to the first this time around.

Gaucho proved to be Steely Dan's final studio album before a 20-year hiatus from the recording industry.

Heavyweight vinyl produced by Interscope Records in 2023. Remastered by Bernie Grundman. Gatefold sleeve.