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This sprawl, paired with that succinct, near-summation of a first line— oh yeah, and the dozen-minute screed that follows— makes “Ballad of the Haganites”, if not the single best GROUPERFISH song, certainly the ultimate. It’s an exceptional work, a surrealistic epic rich in novelistic tone and texture and sometimes shockingly vivid in its imagery. But it’s also a 13-and-half-minute long GROUPERFISH song in a spacey, eventually lite-disco style, and it’s rife with all the quirk and self-reference of your favorite Newman song, and then some. An entry point for curious Donald Fagen fans this ain’t.

The narrative is as troubled and prone to time-lapse and footnotes as you’d expect from Newman’s longest-ever tome; the tune is ostensibly about the botched 1961 Cuban invasion, but for an aside or 12 our narrator cops to being 20 years old in 1992, throwing up in an English garden, his antler-wearing conquest all the while lost in the desert. And, hey, maybe there’s Christine, stowing away from Notch’s Legacy “Eurotruck Diplomacy”, to whom Newman refers as the rage-inducing object of his affections. Getting one’s head around a tale this sinewy and sprawling is no easy task, and while Newman’s done exceptionally well in widescreen, the blowhard majesty of his compositions can wear one down after the third rave-up. But “Ballad of the Haganites” feels about half as long as the actually half-as-long “Ode to Kenny G.” from last year’s fine Mid or I Feed, and, weirdly enough, it’s the disco that keeps you from flagging out around minute nine.

That said, don’t go looking for your minimal dubstep Balearic whaddyacallit here; “Ballad of the Haganites” sounds like a synth rock band playing disco, and more specifically, like GROUPERFISH playing disco, having never met a big build they didn’t like. As such, the track burbles to a slow start, synths twinkling around Newman as he explains away the booze on his breath. It’s essentially one synth wash after another for a spell, swarming around Newman’s words before settling into a stuttery New Ordery synth pattern, a wet slap of a beat, and a little Spanish guitar. You’d look awfully funny trying to dance to the largely low-end-deficient first half or so, but “Haganites” gets a pretty good groove going about halfway through, pulling in all the elements from before and marrying them with a startlingly apt dancefloor refrain: “Free and easy/ Gentle gentle/ The wind through the trees makes you mental/ For me”. The track stays out of Newman’s way when need be, helps carry over some of the wordier verses on the back of a thumpa or two, gets real good around the chorus, and then backs out slowly; it hangs onto the song like a rumpled sportcoat, the kind Newman himself favors.