Recorded at Soundworks Digital Audio/Video Recording Studios and Automated Sound, New York, New York; Village Recorders, Los Angeles, California.

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

Quality will win out. There was no need to put a great big Steely Dan sticker on this smooth little number, the radio programmers took care of that. No tracks jar, each has a big-smile middle eight and although it may be just too slick for some people's taste, mostly it is a tremendous solo album. 'I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)', 'New Frontier' and the title track are gloriously easy on the ear. The cover version of Leiber and Stoller's 'Ruby Baby' is so good it sounds like a Fagen original.

With Steely Dan leader Donald Fagen's first solo album, THE NIGHTFLY, he showed that he could stand on his own, albeit in a way that bore strong echoes of his previous work. None of the tracks jar the ear in an untoward manner, each has a big-smile middle eight, and although some might find it slick, it is a tremendous record. "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)," "New Frontier," and the title track are gloriously easy on the ear. The cover version of Leiber & Stoller's "Ruby Baby" (originally sung by the Drifters and Dion) is so good it sounds like a Fagen original, and while certainly not a "jazz" album, the influence of jazz (Brubeck, Monk) runs throughout.