Description
*This is a Vinyl LP*
Release Date: 2021
Label: Warner Records
Track List
Side A
A1. I.G.Y.
A2. Green Flower Street
A3. Ruby Baby
A4. Maxine
Side B
B1. New Frontier
B2. The Nightfly
B3. The Goodbye Look
B4. Walk Between Raindrops
Review
A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late ’50s/early ’60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date. Continuing in the smooth pop-jazz mode favored on the final Steely Dan records, The Nightfly is lush and shimmering, produced with cinematic flair by Gary Katz; romanticized but never sentimental, the songs are slices of suburbanite soap opera, tales of space-age hopes (the hit “I.G.Y.”) and Cold War fears (the wonderful “The New Frontier,” a memoir of fallout-shelter love) crafted with impeccable style and sophistication. Jason Ankeny
