Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 10/25/1990
Run Time: 38:46
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, All Music Guide