FEATURE:
New Frontier
Forty Years of Donald Fagen’s Debut Album, The Nightfly
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THERE is a bit of debate…
exactly when Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly was released. Some sources say 1st October, whereas others say it is 29th October. Released in 1982, it is the debut album of the former Steely Dan frontman. The duo (with Walter Becker) released Gaucho in 1980. They would return in 200, but there was this period where Steely Dan called time. Fagen’s remarkable debut album came a couple of years after Gaucho. That Steely Dan album was not really up to the peak many were used to. Maybe in need of a break or a rethink, I feel studio perfectionism and endless honing dented the possibilities the album could have achieved. Not that Fagen and Becker were uninspired. Instead, I think it was a time when there were divisions, and they knew that things were coming to an end. By contrast, Donald Fagen’s The Nightlfy is inspired and extraordinary! One of the best produced and sounding albums ever, I wanted to mark forty years of its release. Whether it was officially 1st or 29th October, this month is forty years since one of the all-time great debut studio albums was released. There is a new live album of The Nightfly that is well worth buying. You must seek out the original on vinyl, as it is an extraordinary listening experience. Since its release, stereo and hi-fi manufacturers have used The Nightfly to test their speakers, as it is so immaculately composed and produced.
Produced by Gary Katz (who produced for Steely Dan), I wanted to end the anniversary feature with some features. It must have been strange for Fagen recording without Walter Becker, although many of the same personnel he worked with in Steely Dan are on The Nightfly. Retaining the same wit, intelligence and innovation that he brought to Steely Dan, The Nightfly features classics like New Frontier and I.G.Y. This album is the most autobiographical of Fagen’s career to date. Rather than reflecting the politics of the 1980s, Fagen goes back to his young years in the 1950s and ‘60s and the sense of romance and terror. The threat of nuclear war and political turmoil sits alongside tropical vacations and something idyllic. I think The Nightfly sounds so good because it was one of the earliest examples of fully digital recording in popular music. Because of this, coupled with the hungry and tireless pursuit for perfection from Fagen, it meant that The Nightfly was quite hard to record. The album is remarkably acclaimed and celebrated. It is a masterpiece from one of the greatest songwriters ever. I am going to drop in a recent interview Donald Fagen provided (not necessarily related to the album; it is nice to hear him speak), in addition to a live version of one of The Nightfly’s tracks. Although recording of The Nightfly happened only a year after the ‘break-up’ Steely Dan album, Gaucho, it is amazingly confident, consistent and incredible.
Showing no signs of weakness or adjustment, The Nightfly is a real step up from the somewhat patchy Gaucho. In 2017, Albumism marked thirty-five years of Donald Fagen’s classic. I think the production sound is one of the most notable and enduring aspects of thew album:
“The album, recorded a year after the post-Gaucho breakup of Steely Dan, is a masterwork of production, one of the earliest examples of fully-digital recording. Inspired in part by Fagen’s Cold War childhood in New Jersey, The Nightfly is as intimate a portrait as we’re ever going to get of the notoriously shy bandleader, a sonic vision of a life lived in sci-fi paperbacks and late-night jazz and dreams scented of Ambush perfume and atomic ozone. Fagen, photographed in his apartment with a tie and a microphone and his sleeves rolled up, is here to guide you through the evening with a jazzy soundtrack, a fable or two, a tune you can dance to, a song for your heartbreak.
Right off the bat, “I.G.Y.” is soothing, a mid-60s vision of the futuristic 1976, with Spandex jackets and world peace. It’s narcotic. It is instantly chill. It’s an advertisement for a dream of an America we were once promised but will never fulfill, melancholy and all at once hopeful. Hearing him play a slowed-and-stripped down rendition of this during his tour with The Nightflyers took on a particularly mournful quality, given the current state of affairs of our nation.
The Nightfly also remains a curious case in build-up. The title track doesn’t appear until the second song on the B-side, and the A-side has some of the album’s weaker tracks. “Green Flower Street” has all the patter of a rain-slicked street and a swingin’ cover of the Drifters “Ruby Baby,” closing with the lovelorn (but musically sparse) “Maxine.”
But it just further sets the stage for the B-side, where all the real action is. The album kicks into gear with “New Frontier,” a raucous party in an abandoned bomb-shelter. “It’s just a dugout that my dad built / in case the Reds decide to push the button down.” It seems almost worth building a bomb shelter just to limbo and listen to Dave Brubeck records, plus the added benefit of surviving the nuclear blast. It’s that sort of cheeky look at the apocalypse that makes Fagen so goddamn wonderful.
(It should also be noted that Ambush is still manufactured and can be easily found online. I am wearing some, from what I’m pretty sure was a gallon bottle, as I write this.).
Oh, but “The Nightfly.” Here we are, back from commercial break, and our eminent hipster is here to guide us through the rest of the long night. It’s not difficult to imagine the Fagen on the cover singing this song into that mic, for you and for all the other lost souls out there, just as Uncle Mort soothed his teenage soul all those years ago. “Tonight you’re still on my mind….” he croons to some unknown lady. Perhaps he is singing to me, I think, swooning just a little.
The album winds down with “The Goodbye Look,” which is perhaps the darkest song on the album. There’s a twinge of his late musical partner Walter Becker in here, a sinister quality that is missing from the rest of the album, all feathered over with Fagen’s increasingly-anxious vocals. And it’s in sharp contrast to the album’s upbeat closer, “Walk Between the Raindrops,” an easy, lovely little tune that wouldn’t have been out of place in any Manhattan ballroom or cocktail party of the time.
(In addition to “I.G.Y.,” Fagen performed “The Nightfly,” “Green Flower Street,” and “New Frontier,” during his solo tour earlier this summer. I am not in the slightest bit ashamed to say that I wept with breathless, nearly-orgasmic bliss through most of the first verse. Though he rarely performs his solo work live, he played “Green Flower Street” with the Dukes of September and has been playing “New Frontier” during his current tour, along with Becker’s “Book of Liars” from 11 Tracks of Whack.
Fagen would follow up the album with two more in the “Nightfly Trilogy,” Kamakiriad in 1993 and Morph the Cat in 2006. But 35 years later, The Nightfly couldn’t be more perfect. It remains a record collection essential, a sonic delight. Thanks for calling. I wait all night for calls like these”.
I would definitely recommend people read this fascinating article about one of the best-recorded albums ever. Most wistful and nostalgic than his work with Steely Dan, The Nightfly was definitely a turning point. The music is jazzier, and there is this difference between Fagen solo and Steely Dan. Part of a trilogy of albums (the final was 2006’s Morph the Cat), The Nightfly was the start of a successful solo career for Fagen. His most recent album, Sunken Condos, is ten today (16th October). I do hope that we have not heard the last of Donald Fagen. I want to finish with another great feature about The Nightfly. Five years ago today, Ultimate Classic Rock explained why Fagen went personal for his debut solo album:
“Donald Fagen's solo debut established him as a more grounded, autobiographical writer away from Steely Dan. It also launched a trilogy of albums that wouldn't conclude for decades.
The Nightfly, released on Oct. 1, 1982, uses an overnight stint by a DJ at the fictional WJAZ to transport listeners back to a moment in time from Fagen's youth at the turn of the '60s. At the same time, the album's sound is refreshingly contemporary, as bright as Steely Dan's era-concluding Gaucho album had been muddled.
"I used to live 50 miles outside New York City in one of those rows of prefab houses," Fagen told GQ in 2014. "It was a bland environment. One of my only escapes was late-night radio shows that were broadcast from Manhattan – jazz, and rhythm and blues. To me, the DJs were romantic and colorful figures and the whole hipster culture of black lifestyles seemed much more vital to a kid living in the suburbs, as I was."
Fagen appeared on the album cover as "Lester the Nightfly," based on real-life disc jockeys like Symphony Sid. His long-held passion for jazz played out there too. (Note that old Sonny Rollins record on the turntable.) Albums like that provided a window to the world for the young Fagen during a time of hope and fear.
Fagen was searching, he told The New York Times in 1982, "for some alternatives to the style of life in the '50s – the political climate, the sexual repression, the fact that the technological advances of the period didn't seem to have a guiding humanistic philosophy behind them.
"A lot of kids were looking for alternatives, and it's amazing how many of us found them in jazz, in other kinds of black music, in science fiction," he added, "and in the sort of hip ideas and attitudes we could pick up on the light-night radio talk shows from New York City. More and more of us started looking, until the whole thing sort of exploded and you had the '60s."
Everything about the clear-eyed, merrily nostalgic The Nightfly is resonant from that time. Fagen's No. 26 hit "I.G.Y.," the album's first single, referenced the International Geophysical Year – a global scientific project held from 1957-58 – while looking ahead to a hoped-for time when technology will work in concert with man
"New Frontier," a follow-up single named after a term used by John F. Kennedy in his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic convention, took place during a teen's party inside his family bomb shelter. Period groups like the Drifters and the Four Freshmen had a notable influence in "Maxine" and "Ruby Ruby," respectively, while "The Goodbye Look" seemed to build off the era's revolutionary upheaval in Cuba.
"I actually tried to write these new songs with as little irony as possible," Fagen told the Times. "I guess [Steely Dan partner] Walter [Becker]'s lyrics tend to have a little more bite than mine, to be more detached. I wanted this album to be a little brighter and a little lighter than a Steely Dan record.
"I wanted it to be more fun to listen to," he added. "and I wanted to make an album that was more personal, an album that might help explain how I got diverted from the plans I had when I was in school – which entailed going on to graduate school and getting a doctorate in literature. I mean, what happened?"
Steely Dan happened. But with his old group in the midst of a recording hiatus that would last until 2000's Two Against Nature, Fagen had time to put that in perspective too. A long look back on The Nightfly gave Fagen new insights into his journey.
"I was headed towards a different kind of life really, maybe an English teacher or something like that," Fagen says in Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years. "I studied literature at college, and basically had my course set out for me. When the '60s came along, I perceived that there were other options and, since music was my hobby, I decided to try to make a living at it."
The Nightfly would eventually be part of triad of albums that were meant to represent the three stages of life – youth, middle age and death. First, however, Fagen would have to endure a lengthy layover between the first and second installments as he battled with a crisis of creative faith. You could blame The Nightfly, he said.
"I had come to the end of whatever kind of energy was behind the writing I had been doing in the '70s, and The Nightfly sort of summed it up for me in a way," Fagen told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. "And although I would work every day, I essentially was blocked because I didn't like what I was doing. I'd write a song and then a week later I just wouldn't connect with it at all. It seemed either I was repeating myself, or it just bored me. It wasn't relevant to what I was going through at the time."
The second album, Kamakiriad, finally arrived in 1993 – with Becker as producer. That sparked a long-hoped for Steely Dan reunion, which was then followed by the third and final album in this series, Morph the Cat, in 2006”.
Forty years ago this month, Donald Fagen released The Nightfly. I am not sure whether people expected there to be much activity from him or Walter Becker in the wake of Steely Dan’s Gaucho. Though it wasn’t their last album, both would have felt like taking some time away. Not quite sure of what would happen and whether they would record together again, The Nightfly arrived soon after that break-up. A masterpiece of production, some of Donald Fagen’s best lyrics and vocal performance can be heard on his debut. A favourite of audiophiles through the generations, The Nightfly will always sound astonishing. It will never date or lose that glorious pull and beauty! With a large and incredible array of musicians accompanying him through The Nightfly, it is such a richly layered and textured album that stays long in the memory. Because it is forty this month, I wanted to show my respect to Donald Fagen’s…
MIGHTY and masterful debut album.