Donald Fagen

The ex-Steely Dan perfectionist builds on a great concept, with an album that chronicles Fagen's teenage fantasies about his sci-fi life as a Manhattan sophisticate. The retro-futurism includes the globe hopping "I.G.Y.," the bomb-shelter romance of "New Frontier," and the Cuban intrigue of "The Goodbye Look." The existential jazz D.J. of the title tune almost serves as a guide to the album's narratives.

Steely Dan's long-smoldering fascination with the smoky midnight mysteries of le jazz cool
and the twisted romantic scenes played out under its influence is raised to the art of
concept album on this debut solo LP by Donald Fagen, the group's singer and cowriter.
Drawing on his own adolescence for these "fantasies" (as he calls them in a brief liner
note), Fagen re-creates the illusion of the hip, big-city jazz DJ, a real gone ghoul... More >

Apparently, what Walter Becker brought to Steely Dan was an obscurantism that lost its relevance after the posthippie era. With words that always mean everything they want to say and aural pleasures that signify, these songs are among Fagen's finest, and if their circa-1960 vantage returns us to the student memories of Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic, their tenderness is never nostalgic and their satire never sophomoric. Fagen's acutely shaded lyrics puts the jazziest music he's ever committed to vinyl into a context that like everything here is loving but very clear-eyed, leaving no doubt that this is a man who knows the limits of cool swing and doesn't believe the world was a decisively better place before John Kennedy died. (Grade - A)