Babylon Sisters

Bernard Purdie plays his signature half-time shuffle on the track, and Becker did not perform on it. The Wendel drum machine was not used on it. It took Becker, Fagen, Nichols and Katz more than 55 attempts to complete a mix of its 50-second fade-out. Among the players credited are Chuck Rainey on bass, Steve Khan on guitar, Don Grolnick on electric piano and clavinet, Randy Brecker on trumpet and flugelhorn, and Tom Scott on saxophones and clarinet, with Rob Mounsey arranging the horns and backing vocals by Patti Austin and others.

Pitchfork's Alex Pappademas heard in it a foreboding melody that creeps in like toxic fog and a narrator who spins fantasies of California leisure and ends up talking to himself, while Brecker's muted trumpet mocks him. The Guardian ranked it tenth among the band's twenty best in 2022, saying it returned to their traditional style of complex chord sequences with painfully world-weary results.