Cosmic America

As you know by now, Steely Dan's core identity is the songwriting and performative partnership of Fagen & Becker. And with the group's dissolution in the early 1980s, the partners would occasionally step out on their own and create art under their own name. With Becker abandoning the continent and seeking sobriety and a general life reset after Gaucho, it was left to Fagen to make the first solo record of the creative partnership.The Nightfly came out in 1982, and it sounds...VERY MUCH like a Steely Dan album. Even with Becker gone, much of the machinery that made Gaucho was still in action, from the involvement of the engineering and producer staffs to the roster of ace session musicians. Add in Fagen's vocals and the expected intelligence of the lyrics, and many critics viewed The Nightfly as the natural progression of the Steely Dan creative spirit --- to the point that many critics immediately assumed that Fagen had done all the heavy lifting for Steely Dan and that Becker's contributions must have be