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,
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