It’s Turntable Tuesday because life is too short not to listen to great music! This week on Turntable Tuesday I am opening the October 1, 2021 vinyl release from Donald Fagen titled “The Nightfly Live.” Turn that TV off! Crank up your local speaker or get out there and support your favorite band! Buy media! What are YOU listening to right now?
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October 3, 2021. I opened my door to find a corrugated package on my doorstep from Nashville. It contained the brand new vinyls from Donald Fagen and The Steely Dan Band. Nashville is a quick ship over to my house and Grimey’s of Nashville rocks the customer service. They just flat deliver the goods! Not only was the packaging awesome as always but all this took was a phone call in advance to get these new releases probably faster than I could have physically found them in my local geography.
I already had been listening to the lossless digital tracks as they were released on September 24 and I wanted a hint of the sound of these tracks. I have already added my comments on the new Steely Dan Live album so I am going to focus on this new live collection from Donald Fagen and the amazing talent of The Steely Dan Band. The inside sleeve of the record has a high quality photo on both sides as well as the track list and credits. One note from this list of credits is the reference to the recording method for this album. To quote the album sleeve “Recorded to Steinberg Nuendo Live via Yamaha Rivage/RPio with Rupert Neve-licensed Mic Pre modeling.Captured in SSD’s (solid state drives) and transferred to the Sony Raid Drive. I use a 12 terabyte raid drive in my home studio. A raid drive is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks is a data storage technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy performance improvement, or both. I will leave the technology to the recording engineers but I always like to dig into the science of how things find their way into my audio system. I also like to salute the names like the late Rupert Neve and Bernie Grundman who mastered this record. Rupert brought us some amazing studio recording equipment and Bernie is one of the best ever at mastering in the post-recording process.
Donald Fagen has been talking about the process of recording this album and how it came about. He says back in the fall of 2019 they were at the end of the Steely Dan Band Tour tour and had 16 more shows to finish. He liked the way the band was sounding and wanted to record the moment to show off the band. The current Steely Dan touring Band has been together four times longer than the original Steely Dan Band, so they are very tight. Donald asked the front-of-house mixer if he could make a professional recording off the board and he said, “I gotta run a few pieces of equipment, but I could do that.” The last 16 shows were recorded which included several of the “Nightfly” album shows. Donald liked the way the music was recorded. He said “There was a lot of separation, and there wasn’t all this reverb you hear on a lot of live albums. It’s clean. I picked the best Steely Dan performances from a couple shows and most of the “Nightfly” were from one night at the Beacon Theater but there were a few other better performances I picked for a couple of the other tunes from the Orpheum Theatre. Yeah, I thought it came out really good.”
I have to agree with Donald. The recordings did come out very good and I appreciate the fact I can listen to this music on vinyl and lossless streaming. In fact as I have been working on this blog post I have stopped and listened to both sides of the vinyl uninterrupted and as I write this I am still listening on the McIntosh system cranked up in the listening room via streaming. My personal comment on the vinyl is I absolutely like the vinyl sound better than the digital sound. When I say that I understand the vinyl was born from digital tracks but I can tell you that the vinyl sound just opens up and delivers a more realistic live sound while delivering bass that shakes the art on the walls upstairs over my listening room and studio even though the space is very heavily insulated. ‘Nuff said.
I have many copies of “The Nightfly” and have even blogged about the Donald Fagen Ultradisc version of “The Nightfly” which is quite rare and in my collection. If you want to read more you can find that article at this link: https://www.andrewtalbert.com/turntable-tuesday/its-turntable-tuesday-this-weeks-feature-is-donald-fagens-vinyl-the-nightfly/
I will talk more about this vinyl on my companion podcast episode as well as talk about each song track by track. Go get yourself a copy of this vinyl. It is reasonably priced and readily available. It will make a nice addition to any collection. I really hope this band continues recording some live sets and releases some further albums this way. This touring band is spectacular on stage and Donald is still sounding great. As I say all the time life is too short not to listen to great music!
Until next time I’ll see you, down the road.