Walk Between Raindrops: The Innocent Finale
The shortest and sweetest track on The Nightfly closes the album with pure joy—a moment of grace before the 1960s arrive and everything changes.
Every album needs an ending, and the question of how to end reveals what an artist believes about resolution. After seven tracks of nostalgic longing, Cold War anxiety, and noir paranoia, Donald Fagen chooses to close The Nightfly with two minutes of uncut joy. “Walk Between Raindrops” is the simplest song on the album, the shortest, and maybe the most radical. It refuses to complicate. It just swings.
The track is essentially a lounge standard that doesn’t exist—a song that sounds like it’s been in the American Songbook forever but was actually written by Fagen for this album. The form is simple: verse, chorus, verse, brief solo, verse, out. No bridge. No development. No irony that isn’t affectionate.
The Retro Move
Where “Ruby Baby” transformed a real 1950s song through jazz sophistication, “Walk Between Raindrops” invents a 1950s song from scratch. The melody is deliberately old-fashioned, the harmonies straight from pre-rock pop, the arrangement something that Sinatra’s Capitol Records band might have played.
This is pastiche, but it’s loving pastiche. Fagen isn’t mocking the musical language of his parents’ generation. He’s demonstrating mastery of it, proving he can write in this idiom as fluently as he writes in jazz-fusion. The technical achievement is considerable, but it never calls attention to itself. The song feels effortless because enormous effort went into making it feel that way.
The production maintains The Nightfly’s digital clarity while serving a deliberately analog aesthetic. We hear every detail of a performance that’s designed to sound casual. The precision enables the appearance of looseness, which is the central paradox of all great pop production.
The Band as Orchestra
The arrangement features the full ensemble playing in a swing style that references Count Basie more than any rock influence. The horn section provides stabs and accents that propel the song forward. The rhythm section plays a relaxed shuffle that swings without pushing.
Jeff Porcaro’s drumming here is notably different from his work on other tracks. He plays with brushes much of the time, keeping the dynamics low and the feel intimate. This is cocktail-party drumming, the sound of a jazz combo in a supper club, and Porcaro nails the idiom completely.
The guitar work—probably Larry Carlton, though the credits are ambiguous—is minimal and warm, adding color without taking solos. This isn’t a track about instrumental virtuosity. It’s about ensemble feel, about a group of musicians locking into a style and making it breathe.
The Lyric as Relief
After the thematic weight of earlier songs—nuclear anxiety, surveillance paranoia, adolescent class consciousness—the lyrics of “Walk Between Raindrops” offer relief. The narrator is simply happy. He’s with someone he loves. They’re going dancing. That’s the entire content.
The title image—walking between raindrops without getting wet—suggests luck, grace, the feeling that everything is going right. There’s no irony in the delivery. Fagen sings with genuine lightness, his voice higher and more relaxed than elsewhere on the album. This is the sound of someone not thinking too hard.
This simplicity is earned by everything that precedes it. If “Walk Between Raindrops” opened the album, it would seem shallow. Placed at the end, after we’ve worked through nostalgia and fear and longing, it functions as a blessing. Yes, all of that was real. But so is this. Joy exists too.
The Parallel to “Josie”
Aja ended with “Josie,” a song of uncomplicated celebration that offered release from the album’s preceding tensions. “Walk Between Raindrops” serves the same structural function on The Nightfly—the exhale after a held breath, the major chord after the suspensions finally resolve.
Both songs are about simple pleasures: parties, dancing, the presence of someone beloved. Both refuse the complications that define their respective albums. And both work precisely because they don’t work too hard. They arrive, deliver their mood, and depart without overstaying.
The parallel suggests that Fagen understood endings as gifts. After demanding the listener’s full attention for an album’s length, you owe them a release. The ending should reward their patience with pleasure, not pile on more complexity.
Before November
“Walk Between Raindrops” is set, like the rest of The Nightfly, in the late 1950s or early 1960s. But its placement as the album’s final track gives it a specific temporal position: this is the last moment before everything changes. Kennedy hasn’t been shot yet. Vietnam hasn’t escalated. The optimism that “I.G.Y.” catalogued is still intact.
Fagen gives us this moment of grace knowing that we know what comes next. The innocence is real, but it’s also temporary. The couple walking between raindrops are about to enter a world that will be harder than they expect. The song lets them have their evening anyway.
This is the bittersweet core of The Nightfly: loving an era while knowing it was about to end. “Walk Between Raindrops” embodies that love without the knowledge. For two minutes, the future hasn’t happened yet. The rain is falling, but it doesn’t touch you. You’re dancing, and that’s enough.