The Nightfly - WikiHQ

The Nightfly is the debut solo studio album by American singer-songwriter Donald Fagen. Produced by Gary Katz, it was released on October 1, 1982, by Warner Bros. Records. Although The Nightfly includes a number of production staff and musicians who had worked with Fagen's band Steely Dan, it was Fagen's first release without longtime collaborator and bandmate Walter Becker.

Unlike most of Fagen's previous work, The Nightfly is highly autobiographical. Many of the songs relate to the cautiously optimistic mood of his suburban childhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s and incorporate such topics as late-night jazz disc jockeys, fallout shelters, and the Cuban Revolution. Recorded over eight months at various studios in New York City and Los Angeles, the album is an early example of a fully digital recording in popular music. The nascent technology, as well as the perfectionist nature of its engineers and musicians, made the album difficult to record.

The Nightfly was well-received, both critically and commercially. It was certified platinum in both the US and UK and generated two popular singles with the top 40 hit "I.G.Y." and the MTV favorite "New Frontier". Among critics, The Nightfly gained widespread acclaim and received seven nominations at the 1983 Grammy Awards. The relatively low-key but enduring popularity of The Nightfly led Robert J. Toth of The Wall Street Journal in 2008 to dub the album "one of pop music's sneakiest masterpieces."

Background

As a child, Fagen enjoyed listening to rock and roll pioneers Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, but felt that as rock music gained popularity, it lost an edge. Fagen, a "lonely" child, then turned to late-night jazz radio shows for the vitality he felt the new music lacked. As he got older, he intended to go to graduate school and pursue literature. Instead, he was "swept up" into the counterculture at Bard College, where he met Walter Becker. They later moved to Los Angeles at the suggestion of their friend Gary Katz and took jobs as staff writers for ABC Records.

Their relationship became strained during the making of 1980's Gaucho, largely due to their insistence on perfection. Both Becker and Fagen would later recall they seemed depressed, and Becker was in the midst of drug addiction and withdrawal. After their split, Fagen worked on a song for the soundtrack of the film Heavy Metal, which got him back into the studio. He began working towards a solo album shortly thereafter. "Working on it has been interesting. The fact that it's not a Steely Dan album has freed me from a certain image, a preconceived idea of how it'll sound," he said at the time. Fagen had hoped to record music on his own "a year or so" prior to the duo's breakup. His demos for the album were mostly composed on keyboards and a drum machine and remained without lyrics, to allow for alteration when in the studio.

The Nightfly is one of the earliest examples of fully digital recording in popular music. Katz and Fagen had previously experimented with digital recording for Gaucho, which ended up entirely analog. Nichols built a new drum machine, the "Wendel II"—a sequel to the original Wendel, which was employed for their work on Gaucho. The new model was upgraded from 8 bits to 16 bits and "plugged straight into the 3M digital machines, so there was no degradation" in sound.

Problems with the technology persisted in the beginning, particularly regarding the alignment of the 3M machines. Representatives from 3M had to be called to align the machines, but eventually Fagen and Nichols grew tired of this. Nichols and engineers Jerry Garsszva and Wayne Yurgelun took classes at 3M's Minnesota headquarters and returned knowing how to align the machines themselves. "I was ready to transfer to analog and give it up on several occasions, but my engineering staff kept talking me into it", Fagen remembered. which backs on to MTA Substation #13 at 225 W 53rd Street. In one instance, a strange smell permeated the studio space at Soundworks. The studio staff "gutted" the studio, removing its air conditioning, carpeting, and recording console until they found a deceased rat in a drainpipe. Sessions regularly stretched long into the evening; Fagen would often refer to this as "being on the night train". The album took eight months to record and was mixed in ten days. In a 2020 interview with Leo Sidran, Fagen confessed to having "a nervous breakdown" during mixing, which required therapy, and put him in a writer's block for years.

Composition

The Nightfly is considered more jazz-influenced than Fagen's previous work with Steely Dan, and his lyrics are more wistful and nostalgic than sardonic. Fagen held a "propensity for the perfect drum track", and multiple drummers are credited on the album, sometimes on the same song. For example, on "I.G.Y.", James Gadson played the snare drum, kick drum, and hi-hat, and Jeff Porcaro performed the tom-tom fills. Some songs feature Nichols' drum machine "Wendel II". Fagen feared listeners finding plagiarism in his lyrics, so he altered a lyric in "The Goodbye Look"—"Behind the big casinos by the beach"—as it "reminded him of a line from a well-known poem". He was also concerned the "late line" lyrics in the title song were too close to the late-night news program Nightline.

Songs

The album opens with "I.G.Y.", the title of which refers to the "International Geophysical Year", an event that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. The I.G.Y. was an international scientific project promoting collaboration among the world's scientists. Fagen's lyrics reference, from the point of view of that time, an optimistic vision of futuristic concepts such as solar-powered cities, a transatlantic tunnel, permanent space stations, and spandex jackets. Fagen remembered being enchanted by the prospects of a "gleaming future" and hoped to give an optimistic look back at it. The title of "Green Flower Street" references the jazz standard "On Green Dolphin Street." Fagen's version of "Ruby Baby", written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, is modeled after the Drifters' version of the song. "The Nightfly", the title song, was once described by American novelist Arthur Phillips as a "portrait of a late-night D.J. in Baton Rouge, taking lunatic phone calls from listeners while silently battling his own loneliness and regret." According to Fagen, the song "uses a lot of images from the blues: that hair formula gets its name from Charley Patton, the old delta blues guitarist, and Mount Belzoni gets its name from another old blues lyric: 'When the trial's in Belzoni/No need to scream and cry.'" "The Goodbye Look" alludes to the popularity of bossa nova in the 1960s. Fagen appeared on the album cover despite his reclusive nature. "It was an autobiographical album so it seemed like I might as well go public with it," he said. The cover was shot in Fagen's apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan by photographer James Hamilton. A second shoot was arranged, as the RCA microphone was facing the wrong direction in the first. Gale Sasson and Vern Yenor are credited with the cover's set design. It was also released in its first prerecorded digital form, via half-inch Beta and VHS format cassettes issued by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. It was first widely available on compact disc in 1984; a reader's poll conducted by Digital Audio magazine the following year ranked it among the best releases of the time, alongside Security (1982) by Peter Gabriel (another fully digital recording) and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. (1984). Early CD copies, however, suffered from being manufactured from third and fourth generation masters. Nichols discovered this when he received a call from Stevie Wonder, who told him that his CD copy of The Nightfly sounded "funny." Nichols penned an essay in Recording Engineer and Producer, criticizing record companies' apparent carelessness in manufacturing the then-nascent format. The Nightfly was reissued on various disc formats four times in recent years, each time with a multichannel mix: on DVD-Audio in 2002, on DualDisc in 2004, on MVI in 2007 and on hybrid multichannel SACD in The Warner Premium Sound series by Warner Japan in 2011.

Following completion of the album, Fagen entered therapy and dropped out of public sight. In his memoir, Eminent Hipsters, he writes that "the panic attacks I used to get as a kid returned, only now accompanied by morbid thoughts and paranoia, big-time." He remained paralyzed for much of the rest of the 1980s, "gobbling antidepressants". He came to view The Nightfly as the culmination of "whatever kind of energy was behind the writing I had been doing in the '70s." He turned down requests for television performances, opting only for radio and press interviews. Though he suggested he might do smaller concerts in New York, Fagen did not tour behind The Nightfly. He expounded upon his mental state after the album's completion:

In 2006, Fagen stated that he had not listened to the album "since I made it."

Since resuming as a touring band in 1993, Steely Dan has performed several songs from The Nightfly on occasion; Fagen also did as a solo artist during a 2006 tour in support of his third solo album, Morph the Cat. Steely Dan, with Fagen as the sole original member following Walter Becker's death in 2017, performed The Nightfly in its entirety at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, and Orpheum Theater in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2019; an official live recording compiled from these performances, Donald Fagen's The Nightfly Live, was released in 2021.

Critical reception

The Nightfly was met with near universal acclaim. Billboard labeled it their top album pick in the first month of its release, calling it a "stunning debut" and praising its "typically blue chip crew of crack players and crisp digital production." David Fricke wrote in Rolling Stone that "Donald Fagen conjures a world where all things are possible, even to a kid locked in his bedroom." But in The Boston Phoenix, Howard Hampton tempered his praise. While he loved the song "I.G.Y." ("an infectious ode"), he felt that "The rest of The Nightfly, though exceptional in places, just hasn't that transcendental kick of this song." The sole poor review came from Paul Strange at Melody Maker, who dubbed the album a "bummer. What made the Dan an important band of the early '70s has been replaced by ultra-slick, uninspired background mush."

Subsequent reviews have remained positive. Jon Matsumoto picked it for a "Classic of the Week" editorial in the Los Angeles Times in 1994, calling it an "elegant pop album," praising the album's "vivid lyrical tapestry" and "rhythmically effervescent" music. Jason Ankeny of AllMusic regarded The Nightfly as a continuation of "the smooth pop-jazz mode favored on the final Steely Dan records", as well as "lush and shimmering, produced with cinematic flair by Gary Katz; romanticized but never sentimental... crafted with impeccable style and sophistication." The Nightfly is described as a "superb jazz-pop solo album" in Pete Prown and HP Newquist's 1997 book Legends of Rock Guitar. Jazz historian Ted Gioia cites it as an example of Steely Dan "proving that pop-rock could equally benefit from a healthy dose of jazz" during their original tenure, which coincided with a period when rock musicians frequently experimented with jazz idioms and techniques.

Accolades

The Nightfly was nominated for seven awards at the 25th Annual Grammy Awards in 1983, including Album of the Year and Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical. "I.G.Y." received the most nominations, included on lists for Song of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, and Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocal(s), while "Ruby Baby" received a nod for Best Vocal Arrangement. In addition, Gary Katz was nominated for Producer of the Year. In 2000, it was voted number 288 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums, and in 2006, it was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Commercial performance

The Nightfly debuted on Billboard Rock Albums chart at number 39 during the week ending October 23, 1982, peaking at number 25 on November 13. It debuted on the magazine's all-genre Top LPs and Tape chart on October 30 at number 45; it climbed to number 11, its peak, on November 27. It also charted on Billboard Black LPs chart, peaking at number 24. Internationally, the album charted higher: in Norway, it reached number seven on the charts.

Legacy

The album remains a favorite among audiophiles. In addition to its use in recording studio tests, Clive Young of Pro Sound News called Fagen's "I.G.Y." the "Free Bird" of pro audio, claiming that almost every live sound engineer uses the song to test the front-of-house system's sound response. EQ Magazine rated The Nightfly as among the Top 10 Best Recorded Albums of All Time, alongside the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

Track listing

Personnel

Adapted from the album's liner notes.

|19

!scope="row"| Canada 100 Albums (RPM)

| style="text-align:center;"|25

Year-end charts

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;"

!scope="col"| Chart (1983)

!scope="col"| Position

!scope="row"| US Billboard 200

|99

Certifications

Notes

References

Sources

External links

Official YouTube playlist
Complete lyrics