In the brutal world of American football, teams often employ what they call a "hurry-up offense", a series of plays they can run quickly when time is running out. You don't need to meet Donald Fagen - a hunched, thin and angular presence, the antithesis of "sporty" - in person to realise he's not exactly Mr Hurry-Up. You just have to check his release schedule, which makes even such leisurely operators as Kate Bush and The Blue Nile seem like feverish paragons of industry.

After his first solo album, the timeless classic The Nightfly, appeared in 1981, nothing was heard of Fagen until 12 years later, when he finally got round to releasing the follow-up, the scifi- themed Kamakiriad. The reason for such a yawning lacuna, he confided at the time, was a loss of confidence and direction which, reading between the lines, could be recognised as something between a midlife crisis and a nervous breakdown, a hole out of which he had to climb before continuing his career. This month, he delivers Morph The Cat, the third instalment of what constitutes a loose trilogy - although this time, he has a less sensitive excuse for his tardiness, having spent much of the intervening 13 years working with the reformed Steely Dan, with whom he's recorded one live and two studio albums, and undertaken two gruelling tours.

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