hypersongs

Donald Fagen

The singer and keyboardist of Steely Dan, whose first solo album The Nightfly (1982), a late-night radio fantasy of the early 1960s, became a benchmark of studio recording.

New Jersey and Bard

Donald Jay Fagen was born in Passaic, New Jersey on January 10, 1948 and grew up in the suburbs of South Brunswick, where a teenage love of late-night radio later fed The Nightfly. His first record was Chuck Berry's "Reelin' and Rockin'"; he loved rock and R&B of the late 1950s and then jazz, Bill Evans, Monk and Miles Davis, and later soul, funk and Motown, and Sly Stone. He played piano and, in high school, the baritone horn. He studied English literature at Bard College, met Walter Becker there in 1967, and was briefly at Berklee.

In 1970 Becker and Fagen formed Steely Dan after a Denny Dias advertisement in the Village Voice, the name coming from William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, and a first line-up was assembled in Los Angeles in December 1971 while the pair were staff writers at ABC/Dunhill. After Pretzel Logic (1974) the band became a studio project of the two of them. The studio albums are Can't Buy a Thrill (1972), Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), Pretzel Logic (1974), Katy Lied (1975), The Royal Scam (1976), Aja (1977), Gaucho (1980), Two Against Nature (2000) and Everything Must Go (2003). Steely Dan entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Solo

After Steely Dan split in 1981, The Nightfly (October 1, 1982, Warner Bros.), a solo debut produced by Gary Katz, reached number 11 in the US and went platinum. Kamakiriad (1993, Reprise) was produced by Becker and reached number ten, and was nominated for the Grammy for album of the year; Morph the Cat (2006) won a Grammy for best surround sound album for its 5.1 mix; Sunken Condos (2012) reached number 12. He has called the first three a trilogy of youth, middle age and the final chapter.

He led the New York Rock and Soul Revue (Live at the Beacon, 1991), toured in 2012 as the Dukes of September with Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs, and published a memoir, Eminent Hipsters, in 2013. Becker died in 2017, and Fagen kept touring under the Steely Dan name until 2024; Peter Jones wrote the biography Nightfly (2022). Donald Fagen's The Nightfly Live came out in 2021, and in 2019 Steely Dan played the whole album on stage.

Albums

  • The Nightfly 1982 · Warner Bros.

    His 1982 solo debut: eight songs from the overnight shift of a fictional jazz station disc jockey, among the first fully digital pop recordings.

Songs

  • The Nightfly The Nightfly · 1982

    The title track, sixth on the album: the late-night disc jockey himself.

Sources

  1. Donald Fagen, Wikipedia
  2. The Nightfly, Wikipedia
  3. The Nightfly album, Ultimate Classic Rock
  4. I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World), Wikipedia