"You're Still the One" • Steely Dan (by Tex Gresham and KKUURRTT)

They’re driving half way across the country.

Why? Who knows. 

Maybe because they wrote about a road trip in their first novel Easy Rider 2: Sleazy Driver(s), and it felt like something they needed to do to close the loop. 

A few months before doing so, they received a message from a Professor that neither of them had seen in three, maybe four years, after having read the aforementioned novel. He writes: “Next time you guys do a road trip and can’t decide what to listen to, just put on Steely Dan nonstop and blame me if you get in a fight over it.” 

“We should do that,” Kurt suggests. Contextless, time being a portal that does more damage than good.

“What?”

“Oh. The Steely Dan thing.”

“No. I hate Steely Dan.” 

“I don’t even know them. Not really.”  

So they listen to a few Steely Dan hits. “Reelin’ In The Years” and “Dirty Work” and maybe a few others. They really do give the band a chance, but neither of them are feeling it. Yet the road is long and any distraction is better than no distraction, that point in a long day where the jokes are wearing thin and Kurt keeps responding with a single-worded “funny” to Tex’s attempts, killing them on the vine. They don’t argue about the music because they both agree that these songs are at best bad-adjacent. Sure, not horrible, but the kind of hits you never want to hear again because hits are for the weak.  

Tex encourages Kurt that instead of listening to more Steely Dan, a thing he earnestly does not want to do, they should do this bit where they mix up Steely Dan with “You’re Still the One” by Orleans.

“I don’t get it,” Kurt says. Having never really listened to Steely Dan enough to understand the parallel that is being referenced in a long gestating inside joke between Tex and his sister. Not understanding either who the bit would be for.

“It’s funny,” Tex says. 

And then explains the joke in detail to Kurt.

Which Tex thinks makes the joke even funner. 

The joke being that Orleans is another band and not Steely Dan and their song “You’re Still The One” sounds a bit like the hits they had just listened to and never wanted to listen to again. 

They fight over the joke. 

Not the music.

Tex Gresham and KKUURRTT have a collaborative novel, Pop!, forthcoming from Rejection Letters.