Pitchfork has been doing a weekend series where they commission reviews of older albums, featuring an eclectic mix of genres, artists, and selections. In a strange bit of synchronicity with my last post, this weekend they covered  Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, a solo album released right after Steely Dan released Gaucho and broke up. It’s a great review, and adds a lot of color to the album I wasn’t aware of. There are several classics on this album: IGY, New Frontier, and the title track are all equal to any of Steely Dan’s best output, while some others are a fraction of that quality. The Nightfly was one of the first ten CDs I bought in the late 80’s—I already had several Steely Dan albums on cassette and I decided I wasn’t going to buy stuff I already owned. Right after this, both Fagen and Becker went dark for a couple of decades, and I didn’t reconnect with their later output.