Reviewed by Jon Lulu
Released: October 1 1982 Donald Fagan The Nightfly Genre: Post-Dan Sparkly Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5 Jon’s Rating: 5 out of 5 Highlights: I.G.Y. Green Flower Street New Frontier The Nightfly Allen's Additional Highlights: Ruby Baby Walk Between Raindrops So much can be said about this record by me that it's overwhelming to figure out where to start. Perhaps these two words will work: it sparkles. These are eight beautifully executed, precisely arranged, and expertly played tracks, each one engineered for a bright new world of better living through technology. Indeed, this was an early all-digital recording by the master of precision himself, the singular Donald Fagen. The album is TIGHT. It’s not a Steely Dan record but it does have that crystalline feel they sometimes achieved (Hey Nineteen, anyone?), and a genre-defying sound. But more than any Steely Dan record, this one feels to me as though every single note is planned and conceived as part of a greater whole meant to evoke the dawn of a new technological era – and to question it. In fact, the all-digital recording is its own instant irony, a perfect and earnest forum for a harsh look at the tech-enabled futures envisioned by generations past. Nowhere is this more in your face than on the two giant (and I mean GIANT) tracks, I.G.Y. and New Frontier. After all, what says naive optimism more clearly than a young man attempting (in New Frontier) to use his dad’s nuclear bomb shelter as the venue to seduce his dream girl … by sharing his big plans “to learn design and study overseas”? Answer: nothing. “I hear you’re mad about Brubeck; I like your eyes, I like him too.” Cringe! Do you think it worked? Or did he just jack off that night in the dugout that his dad built in case the Reds decide to push the button down? Regardless of what happened that night in the shelter, the kid was clearly coming off a high provided by the magical future envisioned by the International Geophysical Year of 1958. IGY is perhaps my favorite song ever. It sets the tone for the album (track 1) as a celebration of amazing, and maybe impossible or even wrongheaded aspirations. IGY smolders with cynicism while extolling the virtues of technology – and while sounding absolutely amazing. It must have been as clear to Fagen in 1982 as it is to us today that trusting “a just machine to make big decisions; programmed by fellows with compassion and vision” to make us “eternally free… and eternally young” is, ahem, fraught. But hey, the song also predicted we'd get “spandex jackets, one for everyone” so some things really worked out! Beyond those two giants, a self-aware romanticism pervades, from when the narrator reminisces about idealized love that never really was in Between the Raindrops, to when Lester the Nightfly tells his late night radio audience, “you’d never believe it, but once there was a time when love was in my life” on the title track, which is probably the third best song on an album of great songs. Lyrics and ethos aside, it is the sound of this album that has enthralled me for decades. All the talk of science and precision is not to say the record doesn’t have soul. It does, and that is what makes Fagen so unique. One can imagine his perfectionism as simultaneously devoted to spotless musicianship, *and* aware of the naivete of that ideal in the first place. Green Flower Street, Ruby Baby (a fully Fagan-ized cover of the Drifters song), Goodbye Look, and Maxine are all beautiful, smooth, and basically flawless, rounding out a spectacular record. From the moment I first heard it in the early 80s all the way through to the night, nearly four decades later, when I dragged my girlfriend to see him play much of it at a casino in Michigan, Nightfly has been “the go-to” album for any range of purposes for me. It’s a touchstone. It was the soundtrack for a million long drives and it is the benchmark for any new amp, equalizer, speaker, headphone or earbud I have ever bought. (OK, you claim this thing has good sound? Lets see how it handles New Frontier). This album has been in my ears 10,000 times. It never gets old. What a beautiful world this will be. What a glorious time to be free. Indeed.
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