What white 10 year old looking around the picket fenced suburbs in Ike’s America wouldn’t have felt this way? What a glorious time to be free!Īrtists will have tons of leisure time to create their masterpieces while fellows with compassion and vision will make wise decisions with the aid of just machines. So we have American technology promising a glittering future where New York to Paris will take a mere ninety minutes and the city will be lit up by solar power. BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS TVYet, you can be sure a whip smart, newspaper reading, TV watching, cinema going, obsessive radio listener like young Donald would have, by a process of osmosis, been saturated in the optimism of the age. The reference books tell me this took place between July 1957 to December 1958 when Donald Fagen was not yet a teenager. stands for International Geophysical Year. So let’s kick off as the album does with the glorious, ‘I. The lyrics, sung with cool deliberation and swing, have both immediate attraction and depths to be studied.Īnd, you can listen to it all the way through at any time of the day or night! Oh, and you’ll also find this all lovingly wrapped in cannily composed, superlatively played music produced with technical assurance. It’s a record that shows us an artist brilliantly finding the means to come to terms with the challenges of perspective.įagen’s triumph is the way the individual songs and the architecture of the album as a whole honour and celebrate the hopes and dreams of the youth he was while allowing his older self to offer, without spite or scorn, insightful and sometimes painful illuminations of how easily those tender hopes and dreams could be wrecked upon the rocks.Īnd, the diligent listener to The Nightfly will find themselves glancingly educated (which is often the very best way to be educated) about the moral, social, commercial, political and cultural history of the United States at the hinge of the 1950s and 1960s. The Nightfly is his attempt to answer all those questions. Of course, like the tides there were powerful attractions both to the push towards the future and the alluring pull of the past.Īnd, standing on the shore gazing at the inherently mysterious immensity of those seas it was natural for him to reflect with amazement, affection and no little rueful wonder at the times he had lived through and the evolution of the naive young man he had been into the puzzled, grizzled veteran who was kept awake by the questions we all have to face – sooner or later. He was then in his early 30s and aware that the tides of time were inescapably moving him into a new phase of life. With Walter Becker hors de combat Donald Fagen set to work on a solo record. Lauded with critical garlands each of their 70s albums also featured solid commercial hits.īut, as the 1980s dawned the golden days were dimming fast for Steely Dan. They had pop smarts, jazzbo chops and rock clout all in one sleek package. His partnership with Walter Becker in the peerless Steely Dan had illuminated the 1970s music scene with astonishing lightning bolts of twisted, subversive, hyper intelligence, lyrical misdirection, mystery and musical sophistication. In the 1970s, as co-leader of Steely Dan, Donald Fagen was a veritable tenured Professor of Cool. Yet most of us will recognise and admire (grudgingly or otherwise) those who are authentically hip, hep and cool.Ĭultural insiders who are ahead of the curve and opening up new territory before the masses come to settle on the old. Walk between the raindrops back to your door’ (Donald Fagen) Embed from Getty Images ‘You’ll walk between the raindrops, between the raindrops, So I’m glad I made The Nightfly before a lot of the kid-ness was beat the hell out of me, as happens to us all’ (Donald Fagen) I wouldn’t complete another CD until 1993. ‘During the final mix down of the album, I started to feel kind of funny and that feeling turned into an even weirder feeling that had to do with work and love and the past and morality and so forth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |