In 1980, one studio mistake wiped a Steely Dan song from existence. Then a mysterious Facebook post happened

An assistant engineer accidentally erased most of Steely Dan’s ‘The Second Arrangement’ during the 1980 sessions for *Gaucho*. The band had been preparing the track as the album’s closing song, but the loss ended work on it and left a celebrated piece of their history largely unheard for decades.

The mistake happened while transferring tape: silence was copied over the recording, reportedly destroying more than three-quarters of the song and wasting months of work and as much as $80,000. Steely Dan tried to restart the track, then abandoned it and reworked an older song into ‘Third World Man’. A backup work tape, taken home by engineer Roger Nichols before the deletion, was found after his death; the near-complete recording was shared in 2020, after the band had performed it once in 2011.