his appraisal of the album in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, considered it ironic in the sense that while it focuses on a simpler time, its production sounded like a modern Steely Dan album. Fagen held a "propensity for the perfect drum track”, and multiple drummers are credited on the album, sometimes on the same song. For example, James Gadson and Jeff Porcaro are present on "I.G.Y.", with the former playing the snare drum, kick drum, and hi-hat, and the latter performing the tom-tom fills. Even still, some songs contain the drum machine Wendel II. Fagen feared listeners finding plagiarism in his lyrics, so he altered a lyric in "The Goodbye Look"—"Behind the big casinos by the beach"—as it "reminded him of a line from a well-known poem." He was also concerned the "late line" lyrics in the title song were too close to the late-night news program Nightline. Songs The album opens with "I.G.Y.", the title of which refers to the "International Geophysical Year", an event that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. The I.G.Y. was an international scientific project promoting collaboration among the world's scientists. Fagen's lyrics reference, from the point of view of that time, an optimistic vision of futuristic concepts such as solar-powered cities, a transatlantic tunnel, permanent space stations, and spandex jackets. Fagen remembered being enchanted by the prospects of a "gleaming future" and hoped to give an optimistic look back at it. The title of "Green Flower Street" is a "nod to the jazz standard On Green Dolphin Street." "Ruby Baby" is modeled after the Drifters' version of the song. For his rewrite of "Ruby Baby", he listened to several records from the 1950s to "get a general atmosphere of the period." "Maxine" references the harmonies of the Four Freshmen, and revolves around an "extremely idealized version of high-school romance." The music was created from an Ed Greene drum track rescued from another song, where it wasn't working. "New Frontier" follows a "gawky teenager" inviting a girl back to his family's backyard fallout shelter for a private gathering. "The Nightfly", the title song, was once described by American novelist Arthur Phillips as a "portrait of a late-night D.J. in Baton Rouge, taking lunatic phone calls from listeners while silently battling his own loneliness and regret." According to Fagen, the song "uses a lot of images from the blues: that hair