“The Night Belongs to Mona”—seventh song on Morph the Cat (Donald Fagen) (2006)

If this album had originally been released on vinyl, I wonder if the song order would be different? Maybe this one would have been the 2nd song on Side 2—which is a good place to hide a song meant to sneak up on you. As it is, it’s between two other songs with women’s names in the titles—between the funniest song on the record and (one of) the scariest. It definitely snuck up on me. For the first many, many listenings I heard the smoothest of the smooth, the prettiest song on the album—about a glamorous woman, dressed in black (it’s New York), romantically dark, romantically alone. The chorus softens you up, for sure: “CDs spinnin’/AC hummin’/Feelin’ pretty.” Like an idiot, I asked for her phone number. But that was before I listened more closely and worked my way past the veneer.

Well… I was perfectly happy to just understand this as a song about this person who is in a different league, essentially—we all know her. Even I’ve been called on the phone at “some unholy hour” to talk about “all of this grim and funny stuff.” It’s exciting—but maybe you want to keep her at an arm’s length. And then the bridge comes along, and like all good bridges, it takes you somewhere entirely else. From then on, if you listen carefully, it’s like, “what is happening here?” It goes from present to past tense—I wanted to believe “the fire downtown” was referring to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 1911, and not 9/11—but seeing how this record came out in 2006—9/11 still felt like yesterday (for some, it still does). “We try not to see the writing on the wall,” then, moves us into the future. Now she’s not merely 40 floors above the city, but miles. And it asks a big question: “Will she fall hard? Or float softly to the street?” First listening to this song, I swear he said: “float softly through the street”—which helps that question make more sense. Because with that question, “fall hard” means fail—or at least, come back down to earth—not in a literal sense. “Floating softly through the street” is what we all aspire to. But the printed lyrics (online) contradict that. “Will she fall hard/or float softly to the street?” That is something else altogether. With that question, neither option is good. And it might not make a lot of sense. But you know what else doesn’t? Death.

—Randy Russell 12.17.23