BGV Up

 I was watching the VH1 Classic Albums episode about Aja --  there's a type of person who gravitates back to this episode like a swallow returning to Capistrano, reliably, again and again; I am that type -- and I was struck by Fagen speaking the words to "Black Cow" as the track plays -- that first verse used to hit me very, very hard, when I'd be prone on the floor of my Norwalk studio apartment listening to the album on tape, mining its depths, sober by court order and trying to put my life together. You were very high. You were high!  Fagen emphasizes the repetition, the way it changes the mood from descriptive to accusatory.  But this morning I realized an unvoiced assumption about this song, one that informed both my reading of it and the notions I took from it for my own lyric-writing, then in its infancy, or toddler-hood: I'd written a lot of lyrics by then, but I'm a slow learner. Fagen, as he breaks down the lyric, says it's about a married woman ...