The Nightfly, circa 1983, was hands down one
of the sonically best sounding albums I had
ever heard. And of course, there were so many
great singles from this, his debut solo album,
and probably by a long shot his most successful,
and I had heard them all on the radio. But it
would be several years later before I started
listening seriously to Steely Dan for the first time,
and when I bought this album on CD. It’s hard
to say why I didn’t continue to follow Fagen,
but I hadn’t heard any of his subsequent albums
until I bought this box set, maybe around 2017.
The musicianship was the central appeal, the
melodies, the smart lyrics, and Fagan’s voice,
while not as pleasing to me as other singers,
distinctive and unquestionably skillful, and
the facility he had of moving around the genre
wheel with such fluidity. Is this pop music or
jazz? It doesn’t sound like rock, but it grooves
so hard. The Nightfly is chockfull of great songs,
and when I became aware of this box, I thought,
there’s got to be other great stuff in there.
I understand that Donald Fagen is obsessively
meticulous in the studio, which would explain
why his next record, Kamakiriad, shows up
after his debut album eleven years later.
While it’s predecessor was jazzy, Kamakiriad is
funky, but sonically, they sound nearly identical
to each other, pristine, crispy, and full. Thirteen
years later, 2006, comes the third album,
Morph the Cat. Again, the mind is blown by
how consistent these records are, sonically,
given at least a decade in between each one.
On the one hand, Debbie Downer might say
that this indicates a lack of imagination, or that
Fagen’s music is sort of stuck in time. On the
other hand, one could say that here is a musician
whose vision for a sonic landscape is crystal
clear. And it’s not that the latter albums seem
dated, but rather, that Nightfly sounded ahead
of it’s time. At any rate, each of these albums
are the cleanest, sharpest, the least gussied up
with production of any recordings in my by now
pretty extensive listening history. The one
difference with Morph the Cat might be that
these tunes are uncharacteristically long.
It’s a double record with only eight songs
on it and one reprise. But just like the previous
two records, it’s funky, jazzy, and cool. If I had
any criticism thus far, it’s that this music is
too easy to listen to, too few surprises. He’s
no smooth jazz artist, but this stuff is smooth.
Will anything change with the last studio album
in the Cheap Xmas boxset, Sunken Condos?
The short answer is no. With all of this consistency,
I’m trying to put my finger on why that first
record was comparatively so much more
successful, and I would have to say, despite
the sonic quality and the excellence of the playing,
in the three subsequent albums over the course
of almost 40 years, less than one per decade,
the songs are just not as strong, the hooks
are not as memorable, the grooves are not as
heavy and varied, the arrangements not as
inventive. It stands to reason then, while
one of the last things he put out was a new
live recording from 2021 of the Nightfly songs.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Cheap Xmas: Donald Fagen Complete, Reprise Records, 2017, 2012, seven LP boxset includes Nightfly, Kamakiriad, Morph the Cat, Sunken Condos, and a bonus track LP, 10 Extras, all on black heavyweight vinyl. These pressings are superb. No noise artifacts. Super clean.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 