At the forefront of the digital revolution
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One of the first digital reference CDs to hit the market, The Nightfly is the first solo album by Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen, released in 1982. It was one of the first fully digital recordings of popular music.
In the UK the album was certified Platinum in 2004, despite only reaching #44 on the charts following its release. It has also gone platinum in America. This relatively low-key but long-lived popularity led the Wall Street Journal to dub the album "one of pop music's sneakiest masterpieces" upon the release of a 25th anniversary edition of "The Nightfly" in late 2007.
Paul White, editor-in-chief of Sound On Sound Magazine, said The Nightfly "is always a good reference for checking out monitoring systems and shows what good results could be obtained from those early digital recording systems in the right hands."
Comments (4)
being the first in technology is always a good thing :0)
I didn't realize that this was one of the earliest digital albums. Some other great tracks on it are "Walk Between the Raindrops," "Green Flower Street" and "The Goodbye Look." Part of me wonders if it was the record label's idea to make "Ruby Baby" the promoted single (despite my opinion to the contrary), possibly influenced by James Taylor's label promoting only his covers of oldies.
I caught Steely Dan last year over here and its was one of those shows that had no stage act but the musicianship did all the work, breath taking!
Clean, crispy and cool. I think a remaster came out on vinyl fairly recently. Another early application of digital technology in recording was Ry Cooder's Get Rhythm, which did not work as well and some thought sounded "harsh". I believe Ry himself said he wasn't happy with how it came out. I missed Steely Dan's recent gig at Berkeley's Greek Theater, wish I hadn't.