A Film Canon

This extraordinary album is a sustained, melancholy contemplation of the 1950s from the vantage point of the 1980s, inflecting the youthful optimism of the Baby Boomer generation through the last years of the Cold War, and producing a haunting mediation on suburban melodrama's cosmic aspirations. Not only does this provide a myth of origins for Fagen's distinctively jazzy harmonies (the liner notes inform us that the songs "represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties"), but it radically defamilarises his source material (clearest in the loose cover of Dion's "Ruby Baby"), pairing it with an exquisite, synth-heavy production that ultimately characterises the 1980s - and, more specifically, it's proliferation of digital recording technologies, only just glimpsed at this point - as a resurgence or recovery of everything fleeting, uncanny and melancholy about the experience of recorded music itself; the immediate sense of some absence, or disembodiment. That said, Fagen's synthesisers are only part of the musical palette, and are never obstrusive enough to disrupt this balance between past and present, and its presence in his voice, which has always seemed to hover at a twenty year distance.