| 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 Fifties and early Sixties, 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.
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