Steely Dan - "Charlie Freak"

I get an email from an old friend, a philologist from Montreal, and he's attached a song for me to hear. It's from an album called Pretzel Logic, a favourite of my brother's, but I've never given it much thought. Steely Dan, those studio pedants with a perverted name; why should I listen?! I've got work to do! But the philologist, with whom I used to often play music, says that the song reminds him of early Genesis, which is the second most enticing thing he could say next to that it reminds him of late Genesis. So I listen, and I'll eat my hat if he's not right; it sounds like early Genesis - the ornate piano arpeggios, the mellotron swells, the cryptic, surreal lyrics, and the pretzel logic song structure, not to mention the bounteous fruit and unselfconsciousness - or was that a different Genesis? To be frank, it's been a long time since I listened to Foxtrot or Nursery Cryme, those favourites of my youth, not so long past now, but if you had told me then that on a rainy January morning in a downtown Toronto office building I would be reminded by my friend the philologist, via classic-period Steely Dan, of the nearly-forgotten joys of early Genesis, I would have questioned your thinking.

Toumani Diabate - "Bi Lambam"