Feel the yuletide spirit in his smirk.
[Video][Website]
[6.83]
Brad Shoup: Even though the album was conceived as a break from his previous three, I can’t help but think of The Nightfly and its heady processing of futurism’s memory. Now, it’s as if young Donald awoke last week. “I’m evolving… into something way cooler,” he notes before marking his height with pencil. And “I can hold my breath for a really long time now” is a summer-camp boast if ever I’ve heard one. The futurescape’s still on the horizon, but now it’s sprouting pubes. As ever, the master has his sound: Michael Leonhart holds down the rollicking triplets, his fellow 2000s-Dan alums Cynthia Calhoun and Carolyn Leonhart sound as if they just finished cutting bgvs on “Glamour Profession”. It’s not poignant — if that ever happens, it’ll be my fault, not Fagen’s — just sweet.
[8]
Alfred Soto: “Since you’ve been gone an awesome change has come about,” he sings while his own piano and a frisky drum part project the sense of liberty that as a singer he’s too knowing and restrained to indulge in. Loving Fagen means coming to terms with irony at its most metaphysical — in the seventeenth century Donne/Herbert sense. He’s not exactly willing himself to be enthusiastic so much as trusting the audience to understand he’s winking at them
[7]
Anthony Easton: There is dramatic irony here–right, between what is he trying to convince both the listener and the subject of the song, and what is actually happening. The monologue of bragging as simple facts, but then joke lines (or what seem like joke lines) about being way cool or holding the breath would suggest that the facts are not that simple? Made even more complicated by all that gorgeous brass work. Not sure if I love the lyrics as much as I love those horns.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Inoffensiveness of the highest quality.
[5]
Ian Mathers: How is it that Donald Fagen — no matter how close his backing tracks are to pablum or his characters are to sleazy, crazed, foolish, or evil — manages to remain likeable? Is it just that he always seems to be in on the joke, even when you’re not sure whether there’s a joke in the first place?
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Jazz-disco? Sure, why not. It comes across as somewhat dickish at first, but Fagen, despite his age, sings the lines — and the title’s the opposite of what you expect — with the cheekiness and vigour of a little kid. And he makes you like him, damn it. Well-placed and well-arranged brass is one of the easiest ways to my heart over the objections of my head.
[9]