donald fagen, "the nightfly" -- c or d?

-- paranoia is the hipster's disease (theundergroundhom...), October 22nd, 2004.

And producing China Crisis.

Really really interesting - just to hear all of the parts broken down...

search 'Junkie Girl', 'Book of Liars', 'This Moody Bastard', 'Down In The Bottom', 'Lucky Henry'. Destroy 'Cringemaker', 'Girlfriend'.

If people seriously can't find Kamakiriad, i'll put it up on slsk myself; if you're serious about the Dan, you should hear it.

and the rosie vela album!

Best song ever? I rather think it might be.

If you get really desparate, you could listen to Howard Jones' cover of IGY, that would probably put you off it for a while.

Actually I did stop listening to it, now I'm onto "Snowbound" and "Pixeleen"

Becker & Fagen should be given the Keys to the fucking City. They have improved my life beyond measure. God DAMN this is a wonderful world. [falls face down onto keyboard]

i saw an ad for two morning-show DJs who were conspicuously ugly. so i thought, "haha, 'a face made for radio.'" then i thought of the cover of this album.

i just listened to this on the way home from work! that tower records online sale had the nightfly for $7.99 so i picked it up, wanting to hear new frontier. walk between raindrops is pretty great too!

Best song ever? I rather think it might be.

Wow.

Wow.

We are from such completely different worlds. "I.G.Y." is not only one of my least favorite songs ever, but hearing it actually makes me feel slightly ill. And, no, I'm seriously not being hyperbolic. It sounds utterly soulless to my ears.

But then I'm most assuredly not in any way a Steely Dan fan, which would appear to make my opinions very unpopular in this thread.

what else is on it extras-wise, just the NEW FRONTIER video?

how soes it sound?

The guy I studied engineering under, for one.

God, there's nothing QUITE like "Ruby Baby" for getting ready to leave for a great dinner and the company of friends on a Saturday night.

geir otm

According to the Brian Sweet bio the group used to warm up their vocal chords with 'Ruby Baby' before their live shows in the early 70s.

MAN what a record.

Have had a casette copy of it for years. Don't listen too often to it though.

And afetr reading this thread I'm now belatedly getting this weird image of JBR -- sitting in a fridge and listening to "Maxine".

according to wikipedia:
The Nightfly is widely considered to be one of the best engineered albums ever made. Some audio engineers use it to evaluate the quality of playback equipment.

Out of curiosity, which other records were used for this purpose? Part of what got me into listening to Steely Dan in the first place was curiosity stemming from this very subject, but I can only remember hearing it come up w/r/t Aja and the Nightfly.

hey, maybe I can use the word "curiosity" a few more times

heard today (in a "taco del mar") a cover of THE FAGEN/NIGHTFLY ARRANGEMENT of "Ruby Baby"

clearly impossible

dude, taco del mar is disgusting!

Anyone check this out?
http://www.amazon.com/Nightfly-Trilogy-3-MVI-DVD-4-CD/dp/B000M06SVS

I think i first heard "Ruby Baby" (and prbly "The New Frontier" as well) at a Wendy's.

I heard "IGY" at a Denny's last month.

God, I wanted to be the kid in "New Frontier," minus the design-learning part.

according to wikipedia:
The Nightfly is widely considered to be one of the best engineered albums ever made. Some audio engineers use it to evaluate the quality of playback equipment.

Out of curiosity, which other records were used for this purpose? Part of what got me into listening to Steely Dan in the first place was curiosity stemming from this very subject, but I can only remember hearing it come up w/r/t Aja and the Nightfly.

Interesting question. I've read this about Dark Side of The Moon, altough i think engineers preferred it as an example of using the full range of the stereo field.

for the second time in less than two weeks I just have heard a car go past on my street blasting "I.G.Y."

I think the robodrumming works on “new frontier”, how it plays with the syncopated synth rhythm.

Also, the drumming on the title track is funky as hell.

"I.G.Y."
Best song ever? I rather think it might be.

I had no idea what it was referencing until I read Greil Marcus's explanation (because I was too lazy to look it up myself):

I remember first playing the record and realizing both that I hadn’t thought about the International Geophysical Year (“I.G.Y.“) in decades, and how thrilling its affirmation that anything was possible as soon as the breakthroughs it promised—all in one year—came in.

Every generation probably had a moment like that, where suddenly the possibilities seemed endless and optimism for the world was boundless (or for the less inclined, at least more justifiable). I think that comes through on that track, and it feels all the more poignant whenever I hear it now because I can't imagine ever believing in a shred of that optimism ever again, not after the last eight years.

Fagen said in interviews at the time that The Nightfly was free of cynicism, but certainly all the songs come with a dose of irony about the attitudes of twenty years prior. Forty years after that, even that distancing isn't enough to make that mindset clear to us now, and I wonder what a new Fagen song about the Kennedy era would be like.

Irony and cynicism aren't the same imo

That's the point, but I wonder would the irony curdle into cynicism with further historical perspective.

The vocals and especially the music is so generous that I think not.

I won't have a word said against this album...from top to bottom this album is a thing of absolute wonder..:peak 1982 Warner Bros glory...best drum programming ever committed to (digital) tape...don't think there's been an album since to match its sheer perfection...stiff??...WTF??

I have always enjoyed this album, never loved it. New Frontier was a very prominent radio hit when I was a kid and connotes a sort of innocence for me that is probably beyond the song itself.

I appreciate that others have since raised their concerns about the drums. For me it’s not just the timing from the Wendel sampling drum machine Roger Nichols built for Gaucho—the perfect symbol for the band’s obsessiveness, really—but also the drum sound itself, which is brittler here than what we heard on things like Hey Nineteen and Glamour Profession. This is likely due to the era more than anything, as is the prominent use of synths and sequencers.

All that said, almost every song here is memorable and full of warm little details – multitracked background vocals, bubbly synthesizers. This is something that can’t be said for the increasingly angular and skeletal jazz charts he has spent the vast majority of his career composing thereafter.

Put another way, Fagen and Dan would never again write songs this tuneful or arrangements this playful and maximalist. So there’s that.

Some bottom end missing from the mixing or something. Wish it sounded more like Aja

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzaA3h5sI6A

Here is Patti Austin singing “I.G.Y.” in 1988 with Donald on the DX-7

And David Sanborn on sax. Nice version.

I played this earlier today thinking the opener "I.G.Y." would get me nostalgic over a genuinely optimistic era when progress and science were both embraced, but instead it felt like a vision gone horribly wrong...

"Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright...

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision..."

What a fucking week.

Well, yeah

Heard this the track also from 1982 other day and thought how similar in many ways it is to this LP

Sunny Hills - Bobby Caldwell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5d9AEJLJuI