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 adoption of this nascent technology, as well as the perfectionistic attitude of the musicians and engineers, made the album difficult to record.
The Nightfly was a critical and commercial success. It was certified platinum in both the US and UK, and generated the top 40 hit "I.G.Y." and the MTV favorite "New Frontier". The album received seven nominations at the 25th Annual Grammy Awards in 1983. The relatively low-key but enduring popularity of The Nightfly led Robert J. Toth of The Wall Street Journal to dub it "one of pop music's sneakiest masterpieces."
Background As a child in suburban New Jersey, Donald 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 that newer rock 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. Together, they formed Steely Dan, releasing their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill, in 1972. Over the course of the decade, the group became successful on the strength of the albums Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), Pretzel Logic (1974), Katy Lied (1975), The Royal Scam (1976), and Aja (1977), the band's best-selling effort and a critical favorite. They gradually shifted from performing live to working solely in the studio, making the project a revolving selection of session musicians at the behest of Fagen and Becker.
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. Though Fagen imagined they might "stick it out for a while," he admitted to critic Robert Palmer of The New York Times in June 1981 that the group had separated: "Basically, we decided after writing and playing together for 14 years, we could use a changement d'air as the French say." After their split, Fagen worked on a song for the 1981 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. The album was originally slated to be titled Talk Radio.
Recording and production The Nightfly was recorded in 1981–82 at Soundworks Digital Audio/Video Recording Studios and Automated Sound in New York City, and at Village Recorders in Los Angeles. Producer Gary Katz, engineer Roger Nichols, and mix engineer Elliot Scheiner had all worked on most of the seven previous Steely Dan albums. Many of the session musicians had also played with Steely Dan, including drummer Jeff Porcaro and guitarists Rick Derringer and Larry Carlton. The album's liner notes credit a total of 31 musicians.
During a radio interview on Off the Record in 1983, Fagen revealed that, though initially the album's songs came to him easily, he began to struggle without the aid of Becker. This turned into a lengthy period of writer's block after the album was finished. 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 a fully digital recording in popular music. Katz and Fagen had previously experimented with digital recording for Gaucho, which ended up entirely analog. Nichols conducted experiments and found that the digital recordings sounded better than those recorded to magnetic tape. To prepare to use the digital technology, the album's engineers took classes at 3M headquarters in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The Nightfly was recorded using 3M's 32-track and four-track digital recorders. Nichols built the "Wendel II" digital drum machine, a sequel to the original "Wendel" which had been used on Gaucho. The new model's bit depth was upgraded from 8-bit to 16-bit, and it "plugged straight into the 3M digital machines, so there was no degradation" in sound caused by digital-to-analog conversion.
Problems with the new technology surfaced in the beginning, particularly regarding the alignment of the 3M machines. Representatives from 3M had to be called to align the machines; when 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. They practiced an early form of "comping" Fagen's vocals (which they called "beat[ing] the computer"), wherein he would record multiple takes and the engineers would combine the best lines from each take. On "Walk Between Raindrops", they combined bass parts playing on a keyboard bass and bass guitar; doubling bass lines would later "become common practice on many records", according to writer James Sweet.
Fagen opted to overdub each part separately for The Nightfly. It became enormously difficult, between this approach and the new technology, to record the album. Pianist Michael Omartian "objected strongly" when Fagen tasked him to "set the groove" of the title track on his own, with nothing but a click track for him to listen to. On another occasion, Fagen "demanded subtle timing differences between the left and right-hand piano parts" on "Ruby Baby"; the effect he desired was achieved by having Omartian and Greg Phillinganes play together on the same keyboard. For the "party noises" in "Ruby Baby", the team first suspended a microphone from the ceiling of Studio 54 (located next door to the studio they were working in) and recorded one of Jerry Rubin's "business parties". Unsatisfied with the results, they instead held a party in the studio by themselves and included that ambience in the song.
Larry Carlton, who performs lead guitar on much of the album, recorded his parts in four days. During his time in the studio at Soundworks, he noticed a humming sound coming from his amplifier. The engineers discovered the source on the other side of the wall: a large magnet in an adjacent Metropolitan Transportation Authority substation. 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, which Fagen referred to 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 had "a nervous breakdown" during mixing, which required psychotherapy and resulted in a lengthy period of writer's block.
Composition
The Nightfly is considered more jazz-influenced than Fagen's previous work, and his lyrics on the album are more wistful and nostalgic than the typically sardonic tone of Steely Dan. Fagen aimed for the lyrics to have "as little irony as possible", and stated that his goal was to make an album that was fun to listen to. As many of the songs came from an adolescent viewpoint, he hoped for them to maintain "a certain innocence". As Walter Becker was responsible for many of the more sarcastic elements in Steely Dan's music, many writers have considered his absence the reason for the album's "warm and nostalgic" tone. Another difference between The Nightfly and his work with Becker is that it maintains a focus on a "certain period [or] motif", according to Fagen. Though Fagen hints at autobiographical aspects of the music in the album's liner notes, he downplayed this notion in a later interview: "It is not me exactly. It is a composite character of myself, what I remember and people I knew. Plus, it includes my feelings in retrospect."
According to Sam Sutherland in Billboard, Fagen's songs on the album "shimmer with jazz harmonies and alternately swing, shuffle or bounce to a samba". Will Fulford-Jones, in his appraisal of the album in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, considered the album ironic in that while it focuses on an earlier, "simpler" time, its production sounded modern. 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 while 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 track 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 in Earth science amidst Cold War tensions. 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' recording of the song. For his rewrite of "Ruby Baby", he listened to several records from the 1950s to "get a general atmosphere of the period." "Maxine" references the harmonies of the Four Freshmen, and revolves around an "extremely idealized version of high-school romance." The music was created from an Ed Greene drum track taken from sessions for another song.