he desired was achieved with Omartian and Greg Phillinganes playing together on the same keyboard. For the "party noises" in "Ruby Baby", the team suspended a microphone from the ceiling of Studio 54 – just next door to the studio they were working in – and recorded one of Jerry Rubin's "business parties". Unsatisfied with the results, the group instead held a party in the studio by themselves and included that ambience in the song. Larry Carlton performs lead guitar on much of the album and recorded his pieces in four days. During his time with the group, he discovered a humming sound coming from his amplifier. The engineers discovered the source on the outside of the building: a large magnet "that formed part of the New York subway system." In one instance, a strange smell permeated the studio space at Soundworks. The studio staff "gutted" the studio, removing its air conditioning, carpeting, and recording console until they discovered the cause of the smell: a deceased rat in a drainpipe. Sessions regularly stretched long into the evening; Fagen would often refer to this as "being on the night train." In the end, the album took eight months to record and was mixed in 10 days. Composition The Nightfly is considered more jazzy than Fagen's previous work with Steely Dan, and his lyrics are more wistful and nostalgic than biting. Fagen aimed for his lyrics to have "as little irony as possible”, and his goal was to make an album that was fun to listen to. As many of the songs come from an adolescent viewpoint, he hoped for them to maintain "a certain innocence”. Walter Becker was responsible for the more sardonic elements in Steely Dan, and many writers have considered his absence the reason for the album's "warm and nostalgic" tone. Another difference between The Nightfly and his work with Becker is that it maintains a focus on a "certain period [or] motif”, according to Fagen. Though Fagen hints in the album's liner notes that it is an autobiographical piece, he downplayed this notion in a later interview: "It is not me exactly. It is a composite character of myself, what I remember and people I knew. Plus, it includes my feelings in retrospect”. According to Sam Sutherland, writing for Billboard, Fagen's songs "shimmer with jazz harmonies and alternately swing, shuffle or bounce to a samba“. Will Fulford-Jones, in