The Best Version Of… Joe Jackson's Night And Day

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When Joe Jackson’s debut album Look Sharp! landed in record store bins in January 1979, critics on both sides of the Atlantic quickly lumped him together with fellow Brits Graham Parker and Elvis Costello. Dubbed the “Angry Young Men” in homage to the collection of English playwrights and novelists first saddled with the sobriquet in the 1950s, the trio of singer-songwriters shoehorned a cynical, punk-flavored variant of power pop onto airwaves still dominated by soft rock and disco.

Their contemporaneous singles — “Local Girls,” “This Year’s Girl,” and “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” — shared some obvious sonic and subject-matter similarities, and the sense that the three represented some type of movement likely bolstered each’s commercial prospects in the same way that Walter Cronkite’s declaration of a musical “British Invasion” buoyed the hopes of the U.K. acts that followed The Beatles across the Atlantic in the early-’60s. But the “Angry Young Men” moniker masked crucial differences between Parker, Costello, and Jackson that were evident from the beginning and would become even more obvious in the years to come.

While Jackson unfailingly credited Parker as an influence, he was eager to distance himself from the “Angry Young Men” image. “I didn’t feel like I was part of a movement, or anything like that…,” he told Classic Pop’s David Burke in 2019. “I always thought it was funny. I used to imagine this angry young man. What kind of person would this be? Someone who gets up in the morning, feeling angrily, and eats his breakfast angrily?”

Rather than a dyspeptic outlook or musical vision, what the “Angry Young Men” ultimately shared was a resolute resistance to commercial whims, and none was more admirably obstinate than Jackson. As the iconoclastic Piero Scaruffi has written, “Jackson was the most eclectic and erudite of them all, and he proved it by taking on calypso, gospel, soul, jazz and, last but not least, classical.”

However, Jackson’s determination to follow his artistic impulses wherever they’ve led has meant that — outside of his “Angry Young Man” era — his recorded output has rarely overlapped with record buyers’ fickle tastes.

The key exception to this rule is Jackson’s 1982 album, Night and Day.

When Jackson decamped to Blue Rock Studio in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood in January 1982, Look Sharp! was three years old. Artistically, it seemed much older. Each of the three albums that followed his debut — 1979’s I’m the Man, 1980’s Beat Crazy, and 1981’s Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive — sunk further down the charts than the last, and Jackson was in the midst of the third or fourth reinvention of his young career, depending on one’s count.

But rather than retreat into “Angry Young Men” guitar rock or join the synth-pop ascendance, Jackson took to the piano and crafted a variegated, jazz- and Latin-influenced dusk-to-dawn song cycle inspired by New York City, his newly adopted home. Lifted by two top-20 singles, Night and Day reached number four on the Billboard album charts and garnered two Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year for “Steppin’ Out.”

Thanks to Jackson’s co-producer David Kershenbaum and Blue Rock engineer Michael Ewasko, Night and Day’s audio quality matched its artistic merits. When Mix magazine selected the 175 most significant albums of the period from 1977 to 2001, Night and Day made the cut alongside commonly cited sonic masterpieces like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Steely Dan’s Aja, Rickie Lee Jones’s self-titled debut, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, Paul Simon’s Graceland, Peter Gabriel’s So, Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club, and Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind.

For these reasons (and more) Joe Jackson’s Night and Day is the subject of this installment of “The Best Version Of…” *

Born David Ian Jackson in 1954 to a working-class family, Joe (a nickname that would come later) spent most of his childhood in Portsmouth, England, first in a council flat then a council semi-detached house. While Jackson’s father could be abusive, his mother was unfailingly kind. What they shared, according to Jackson, was a commitment to “the first rule of English working-class life: Never appear to be odd, eccentric, artsy, stuck-up, or in any way different from everybody else.” Jackson’s artistic impulses made adherence to that stricture difficult, while his severe asthma — which necessitated multiple hospitalizations and ruled out participation in sports — flagged him as a target for bullies. “Inevitably, I became a bit of a loner, a bit of a misfit,” Jackson wrote in his erudite 1999 autobiography. “I didn’t want to be that way. It just seemed to happen.”

Initially attracted to literature and comics, the adolescent Jackson found himself enthralled with The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. He took up the violin, then the piano, and shifted his musical interests from rock ‘n’ roll to classical. “I idolized Beethoven in the same way that other people around me were idolizing bands like Cream,” he told Musician’s David Gann in 1983. Along the way, Jackson expanded his tastes to jazz, leading to lifelong love of Charlie Parker’s music. After developing his piano and percussion skills in Portsmouth Technical High School’s music classes, Jackson landed at spot at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Music. But Jackson’s time at the Academy had the unintended effect of reviving his interest in rock and pop. “The Royal Academy of Music was probably one of the least useful things I’ve done in my career as a musician,” Jackson told Trouser Press in 1982. “I learned a hell of a lot more having to back singers and read charts, thinking how to keep a pub full of drunken morons entertained for two hours and not be fired at the end of the evening.”

Jackson began playing piano in Edward Bear, a top-40 cover group. Roiled by lineup changes and forced to change names to avoid being confused for the Canadian group, Edward Bear became Arms & Legs in 1974. Now a quartet that included bassist Graham Maby, who would become Jackson’s longtime collaborator, the group focused on writing original songs and were signed to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s label. After three singles failed to chart, Arms & Legs was dropped, and its members went their separate ways. Jackson returned to Portsmouth and took a job as the musical director for the local Playboy Club where he accompanied cabaret acts. These gigs allowed Jackson to save enough money to record demos of his own songs, for which he recruited Maby, guitarist Gary Sanford, and drummer Dave Houghton. While the demos initially failed to land Jackson a record deal, he was signed to a publishing deal at Albion Music by John Telfer, who became Jackson’s manager.

Coincidentally, a young American producer-turned-A&R man named David Kershenbaum happened to be in the U.K. scouting new acts just as Jackson was circulating his demos. As Kershenbaum recalled in a 2015 interview:

I ended up producing independently for A&M. My first big production was [1975’s] Diamonds & Rust with Joan Baez. It was a major multi-platinum album for her, and after I did that album, they sent me to London. I worked out of the UK office, trying to find some talent because talent was starting to change about that time. Elvis Costello had just kind of broken, and I saw his advertising, and I thought, “This is just the coolest, you know? I just can’t believe that this is this cool.” I called his manager at the time and I said, “Look, if there’s any way ever to produce this guy, I’d really, really love to be involved.” And he said, “Well, what makes you think you can produce an artist like Elvis? You’ve produced Cat Stevens and all these other artists.” And I said, “Look, it’s not about that. It’s about feeling it, and I really feel it.” He laughed it off.

I talked to [A&M’s co-founder] Jerry [Moss], and I said, “Jerry, you gotta let me stay [in the U.K.] a little bit longer.” He said, “Okay, you got another month.” So I’m not really even employed by A&M. I’m just there kind of as an emissary. And the last weekend, Jerry had called and said, “Okay, time to come home.” I hadn’t found anything…. and the last Friday of that weekend, it was raining in London, and it was time to go. I had one more appointment, and I’ve just about left. I decided not to leave. He came in, and it was Joe Jackson. And he walked in with “Look Sharp,” “Sunday Papers,” “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” and all those great songs…. The rest of it was history. We made a record [Look Sharp!]…. It turned out to be a nice run for all of us.

If Look Sharp! and its hit single, “Is She Really Going Out with Him?,” validated Kershenbaum’s instincts and made Jackson into an unlikely star, it also placed enormous pressure on each to keep the momentum going. Barely a month after Look Sharp!’s release, A&M shepherded them back into the studio. The resulting album, I’m the Man, reached record buyers a scant nine months after Look Sharp!. Dubbed “part two of Look Sharp!” by Jackson, I’m the Man was a clear step forward from his debut. But it failed to reach the same chart heights, particularly in the U.S.

Only a year into his recording career, Jackson found himself at an artistic crossroads. “I would either have to turn Look Sharp! into a formula and crank it out indefinitely, becoming a cartoon character in the process,” he wrote in his autobiography, “or do some growing up in public.” Jackson opted for the latter.

1980’s self-produced Beat Crazy was, according to Jackson, “The stereotypical difficult third album, in which we tried to change the formula a bit without quite knowing how.” On it, he foregrounded his love of reggae and surprised listeners by delegating the lead vocal on the opening title track to Maby.

If Beat Crazy gently challenged listeners’ expectations of what a Joe Jackson album should sound like, its follow-up obliterated them. Released in June 1981, Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive consisted of covers of swing and jump blues tunes originally popularized by artists like Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway. “Rock-and-roll is too narrow and limiting,” Jackson explained to the New York Times’ Stephen Holden. “That’s why I’ve been trying to make connections with earlier traditions…. People have weird ideas about the history of rock. They think it came suddenly out of nowhere, and they’re absolutely wrong. That’s what Jumpin’ Jive was about. Louis Jordan’s jump-blues was a huge influence on Chuck Berry and Bill Haley.”

The one-two punch of Beat Crazy and Jumpin’ Jive succeeded in establishing Jackson as an artist unwilling to be shoehorned into stylistic boxes. But his declining commercial fortunes also placed his career in jeopardy. “The first two albums did really well, I’m the Man and Look Sharp!,” Maby said 2020. “Then the third album, Beat Crazy, did not do so well. Then the drummer left, and we did this kind of one-off album called Jumpin’ Jive, which people love, but it didn’t exactly sell in the hundreds of thousands. And I just remember thinking that maybe the party was over, and things were kind of winding down.”

While Maby and the rest of the band remained in England, Jackson relocated to New York City, which would become his home for the next two decades. “I just fell in love with it,” Jackson recalled in 2019.

Already disdainful of genre-based provincialism, Jackson approached New York’s eclectic sonic landscape with the exhaustive enthusiasm of an autodidact. “I spent a lot of time in New York,” Jackson explained in 1982, “and the amount of music I saw there was fantastic. All over the city, every night of the week you could hear great jazz, salsa, Brazilian, funk, and rap music. Who needs rock ‘n’ roll when all that’s happening?”

Of all the sounds that Jackson absorbed in the city, perhaps none captivated him more than salsa. “If your ears are open to music and you spend any amount of time in New York City, you have to notice the Latin thing, simply because it is so strong and really happening,” he said in 1984:

It amazes me that people living here will just get wrapped up in their own little scene and not be aware at all of how much is going on. I always get the impression that if I suggest people check out some salsa, they’ll reply, “But Puerto Ricans listen to that, so we wouldn’t like it. Besides, it’s Spanish.” That’s the only barrier as far as I can see, but it’s not as big a barrier as it seems. People just aren’t open enough. I don’t understand why people listen to only one kind of music. It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like wearing the same clothes or eating the same food every day.

Jackson’s musical diet inevitably influenced the songs he began composing in his sublet East Village apartment and subsequently demo’d at Master Sound Studios in Astoria, Queens. “At the time, it was incredibly low tech…,” Jackson remembered. “It would literally be me and a piano and an electric piano and some cheesy synth playing the bass line and a drum machine or something like this. It was like really raw. It was just to give people an idea of the songs. Although the arrangements didn’t change much, actually, when I made the album.” Despite Jackson’s modesty, these demos — which appear on the 2003 “Deluxe Edition” of Night and Day — match the quality of such one-man-band luminaries as Pete Townshend or Todd Rundgren. “Joe comes fully armed with very elaborate and usually very good demos that he’s made…,” Maby said in 2020. “I’ve been telling him he’s got to make the demos shittier to leave a little more [room] for us to make it our own.”

The Night and Day demos presented Maby with other challenges, too. “Larry [Tolfree], the drummer that played on the Night and Day album, and I were in England before we went over [to New York] to make the recording…,” Maby recalled in 2019:

Joe said, “There’s gonna be some Latin rhythms on this record.” He was already living in New York at that point… [and] Joe sent Larry and me a couple of cassettes that he’d recorded labeled, “Understanding Latin Rhythms.” [Laughs] It was people like Tito Puente on there and Mongo Santamaria, and they were just demonstrating the Merengue or the Cha-Cha, you know? And I remember listening to that and thinking, “That’s really cool. I really like that.” But then I was listening to some ensemble pieces, and I’m listening to the bass, and I’m thinking, “The fucking bass never plays [on the] one. I don’t know if I can do this.” It kind of drove me crazy for a few days, and then I was like, “Oh, alright. Now I’m starting to get it.” So by the time we got to New York, we were [okay]. But I think about that now, that Joe trusted us to learn a new genre and do a good job with it, or a good-enough job. I mean, he did have a couple of bona fide Latin percussionist on the record as well. But clearly that was an education.

Despite Jackson’s enthusiasm for salsa, Night and Day wouldn’t be a straightforward genre homage like Jumpin’ Jive. Instead, he sought to blend the sounds of New York into a syncretic sonic stew. “I wanted to make an album that sounded more like New York as I saw it, which was not really a rock and roll album, actually,” he told the BBC’s Johnnie Walker in 2019. “It was more influenced by jazz and disco, dance music, Latin music, and so on, and I thought that was more of a New York mix. I mean, you even had the very beginnings of hip-hop around that time. So I wanted to take it away from this kind of post-punk guitar sound to something else, and it was a bit experimental, really.” Some of Jackson’s new tunes featured Latin percussion, while others nodded to everything from Tin Pan Alley and the Talking Heads to Springsteen and synth pop.

Wherever the sounds came from, the result sounded little like either the “Angry Young Man” anthems that launched his career or the searching experiments of Beat Crazy. “Joe’s demos… were so different,” Maby explained in 2020. “I listened to ‘Breaking Us in Two,’ and I just remember thinking that it was commercial suicide, and this was the end of Joe’s career…. There was no guitar at all. I just remember thinking, ‘This is so different from the first three albums…. People are not going to get it.’” Jackson agreed, but it did little to deter him. “I thought everyone would hate it at the time,” he told Walker. “I mean, I thought, ‘Oh god, commercial suicide, here we go.’”

In order to turn yet another artistic detour into a commercially viable album, Jackson enlisted Kershenbaum, with whom he hadn’t worked since I’m the Man, as producer. “David has a strong technical background and a really detailed ear for pure sound,” Jackson told Record’s Chris Salewicz in 1984. “He can listen to a mix that sounds perfect to me and make it better every time.” Not that Jackson expected or wanted Kershenbaum to transform the arrangements on his fully-developed demos. “[A] lot of producers these days are obliged to be arrangers,” Jackson continued:

Most musicians can’t even read music. They just know a few chords, go into the studio and bash away until something emerges. The producer is then given the job of making some kind of order out of this chaos. But I believe a lot of that order should be imposed by the musicians, and that before you go into the studio you should know what everyone is going to be playing. So that’s what I do. But I take it a step further, to a point where I know what I want it to sound like. I know, for example, what kind of echo I want to hear on the voice. I know what kind of balance things should be in, and so on.

Jackson’s entreaty to Kershenbaum couldn’t have come at a worse time for the harried A&M exec. But the quality of Jackson’s new tunes persuaded Kershenbaum to make a career-altering decision. As Kershenbaum remembered:

Shortly after coming back to the U.S. [from England], I became vice president of A&R at A&M. [I] signed Janet Jackson [and] Bryan Adams, work[ed] with Supertramp, work[ed] with Peter Frampton. I pretty much supervised the whole roster at the time…. I was trying to produce and run the A&R department [simultaneously]. And one day Jerry [Moss] said, “You look horrible. You really need to make a decision if you want to be a producer or an A&R guy. Either one’s fine with me.” So I said, “Look, Jerry, I made a commitment. I really want to continue with A&R. I’ll back off [production].”

And about two weeks into it, Joe Jackson calls, and he says, “David, I’ve got this album, and it’s going to be my biggest album. You gotta help me with it.” I said, “Joe, you know, I just made this promise to Jerry and everything [but] send [me] the [demo] tape.” So he sends the tape out, and it’s the Night and Day album. In it is “Stepping Out” and all those great songs. So I went to Jerry, and I said, “Jerry, you know, I really got to do this.” And he said, “I totally understand I want you to do it.” So I left A&M, as far as being on staff, [and] I produced that album, which turned out to be a really nice album.

Jackson selected Blue Rock as the studio where Kershenbaum and his band would try to top his superb Night and Day demos. “We recorded at Blue Rock Studio in New York’s SoHo [Manhattan] neighborhood on Greene Street. Soho then was a gritty neighborhood of warehouses and loft rentals. At night, it was deserted,” he told the Wall Street Journal’s Mark Myers in 2018. “I recorded the album in January and February of 1982, late at night. Those hours suited me. The studio was small, which was perfect, since I didn’t need much room to record all the instruments.”

Blue Rock Studio was founded in 1970 by producer, engineer, and composer Eddie Korvin. To design the recording space, Korvin turned to budding architect and acoustician John Storyk. Blue Rock was only Storyk’s second commission, but his first was Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios. These early triumphs would make Storyk one of the most in-demand audio architects in the country. His challenge with Blue Rock was to turn the awkwardly long and narrow loft-style space into a state-of-the-art recording facility that could compete with New York’s famed studios.

Credit: February 1986 issue of Recording Engineer/Producer. Scan by World Radio History.

In Storyk’s view, the Blue Rock design proved to be “an interesting example of what can happen in an environment which at first glance does not appear to be conducive to a recording facility.” As he and partner Robert Wolsch wrote in a 1976 issue of Recording Engineer/Producer:

What had to be done was to make the room appear acoustically much wider than it really was and at the same time architecturally create the apparent widening of space. The solution was a wall system consisting of a repeated series of vertical fins having two surfaces: 2” linear painted fiber-board and rigid plywood. The angles of the smaller plywood fins changed ever so slightly as one went from one end of the room to the other, giving an extremely broad first reflections pattern. A first reflection(s) pattern, here, is a reasonable indication of any mid and high frequency focusing — a situation which would obviously be unsatisfactory, particularly in a narrow room. The 2” linear fiber board provided the necessary absorption on the wall. Suspending 1” thick duct liners from the ceiling with clip hangers provided all the additional absorption needed in the room.

Storyk’s design was finished a year late and 150 percent over budget. But the design must’ve wowed Korvin, who nonetheless turned to Storyk again in the mid-’70s when looking to upgrade Blue Rock’s control room. The revamped Blue Rock opened in 1978 with a new 24-track Neve 8058 console and Studer A80 tape machine, as well as Altec Lansing “Big Red” 604E and JBL 4311 monitors in custom-designed housing.

In addition a technological revamping, Korvin also brought new blood to Blue Rock’s staff in the mid-‘70s when he hired engineer Michael Ewasko. “I started, I guess, back in ‘75 or so — just out of the blue,” Ewasko recalled in an interview with me:

I had studied electronics, and I was always a wanna-be guitar player and musician. I heard of an opening at the studio as an intern, and I took the job there. It was a small, one-room 16-track studio at that time, on Green Street off of Canal in Manhattan.... It was a real, real rewarding experience getting to work musicians — everything from rock ‘n’ roll to jazz to commercial work [like] radio and TV commercials. Being exposed to a lot of different music that I hadn’t been exposed to previously was really a good education in music, and I loved recording music. I loved the idea of manipulating sound and then recording sound.

Ewasko quickly rose from Korvin’s assistant to the studio’s head engineer, which is the role he’d fill on Night and Day.

Despite Blue Rock’s impressive pedigree, it’s main output throughout the early ‘70s consisted of excellent — but not necessarily commercial successful — jazz, funk, and soul albums by artists like Don Cherry, Jaco Pastorius, The Fatback Band, Astrud Gilberto, Black Ivory, Madhouse, Sony Stitt, and Larry Young.

That’s not to say that none of Blue Rock’s early sessions made a significant commercial impact. In 1971, Bob Dylan — who could’ve had his pick of any studio in the world — booked Blue Rock for the recording of “Watching the River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” which provided some of the only new material on his bestselling Greatest Hits Vol. II.

Dylan’s wasn’t the Blue Rock credit that captured Jackson’s attention, though.

Despite receiving the seal of approval from “The Voice of a Generation,” Blue Rock’s late-’70s sessions leaned towards the avant-garde. Carla Bley, Frederic Rzewski, Mike Oldfield, Brian Eno, and David Byrne all selected Blue Rock for significant recordings. But perhaps no artist tied themselves to Blue Rock more than Television’s erstwhile frontman Tom Verlaine, who recorded three of his first four solo albums at the SoHo studio. According to Ewasko, it was Verlaine’s work that brought Jackson to Blue Rock. “I worked a lot with Tom…,” Ewasko told me. “Joe had said that, if I remember correctly, [he] had heard one or more of those albums and was interested in Blue Rock studio.” Indeed, Jackson would cover Television’s “See No Evil” on his 2015 Fast Forward album.

In talking with Ewasko, Jackson made clear that the conspicuous absence of guitar on his demos would carry over to the sessions at Blue Rock. “[He said] this was going to be a new style for him where there were going to be no guitars on the record,” Ewasko recalled. “It was no strings involved except for bass guitar. It was gonna be... mostly keyboards and percussion. That was his plan for the record.”

While Jumpin’ Jive had neglected guitars, their absence from swing and jump blues covers seemed less remarkable than Jackson’s decision to banish them from a potentially make-or-break album of new material. “I didn’t hear guitars in my head for this album,” he told Trouser Press in 1982. “It wasn’t a sudden decision, policy, or political statement. The music sounds fresh and clean without guitars. I didn’t want Night and Day to sound like a rock ‘n’ roll album, in the sense of what most people associate with rock ‘n’ roll.” Here, too, salsa’s influence loomed large. “I have a real empathy with Latin piano,” he told Holden, “and I became a fan of Eddie Palmieri. A lot of my keyboards on the album are a rip-off of his style, though I like to think he wouldn’t mind.”

With Kershenbaum on board and Blue Rock booked, Jackson summoned Maby and Tolfree from England.  “So we traipsed over to New York,” Maby recalled in 2020:

And one thing I remember was going to a lot of gigs and listening to a lot of Latin bands. Fucking really good ones, too. We saw Tito Puente and Ray Barretto. So that was really exciting…. I was excited that we were making another album — that we that we were being allowed to make another, right? The other thing was [that it was] the first time I’d ever made an album in New York. So that was very exciting, as well.

In order to add some “bona fide Latin percussion,” as Maby put it, to the Night and Day sessions, Jackson turned to Sue Hadjopoulos. In 1982, the New York-born Hadjopoulos was best known as the timbalera on Larry Harlow‘s Latin Fever album. While she’d been gigging around New York, it’s not clear whether Jackson had seen her during his Big Apple sojourn. “I actually had to go in and audition,” Hadjopoulos explained in a 2021 interview:

I wasn’t really familiar with Joe Jackson at the time. I came out of a Latin and a funk/jazz-fusion background. That’s what I was playing and doing jingles and stuff, studio work…. I just wasn’t familiar with the person. I mean, the only Jackson I had heard of was Michael Jackson’s father, Joe Jackson….

Believe it or not, back then they actually put an ad in… The Village Voice. But they didn’t say who [it was for]. They just said, “Record artist looking for percussionist who knows salsa, can play all these instruments,” you know? I was like, “Oh, well, it says vibes, too,” and I really hadn’t played vibes. I had taken maybe six months of marimba lessons with Richard Brown of the Houston Symphony Orchestra when he had come to New York City. I’m not a mallet player, really. I can just memorize parts and stuff. But I’m not really a mallet player. I’m a Latin percussion player, small percussion. So I said, “Oh, well, I don’t know.” But then, it’s like, “Say yes, until you have to say no,” you know?

As it turned out, when I went in there to audition, they just had a bunch of percussion set up. And it was like, “Okay, well, here’s the songs.” I had heard, like four songs. And he just said, “We’re gonna play and just play what you want to play to it.”

Given that Hadjopoulos went on to play with Jackson for the next three decades, it’s safe to say that she passed the audition.

Although Jackson hired Hadjopoulos purely for musical reasons, the addition of a woman to his band dovetailed with his growing reputation as one of his generation’s most thoughtful songwriters on issues of gender and sexuality. He’d already followed the cheeky “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” with I’m the Man’s gender-bending “It’s Different for Girls,” and one of Night and Day’s standout tracks would be “Real Men,” a searching exploration of masculinity.

With Hadjopoulos on board, Jackson leaned into the symbolism of one of Britain’s “Angry Young Men” selecting a woman for his band. “We auditioned quite a lot of people for the percussionist gig, and Sue Hadjopoulos happened to be the perfect person, regardless of the fact that she’s a woman,” he told Musician’s David Gans in February 1983:

I hadn’t considered that there might be female musicians out there who would be right for the band. On the other hand, I hadn’t not considered it. It got me thinking that there must be a lot of great female musicians and, seeing as we needed two keyboard players [for the Night and Day tour], there must be at least one good female keyboard player who would be right for the band. So we made a special effort to look for a woman [keyboardist Joy Askew].

I think in a way it is a kind of political statement. That sounds very heavy-handed, but all along I’ve written songs about men and women as people. I don’t write songs that say, “Hey, pretty baby, put your red dress on.” “It’s Different For Girls” is a song where the typical roles are reversed. It’s about a guy saying, “I don’t want to just go to bed with you — I want to talk and get to know you,” and the girl’s saying, “Oh, come on with that love stuff. Give me a break — let’s just get it on.” A lot of my songs have things like that in them, and I’ve noticed that we have a lot more female attendance at our gigs than most rock ‘n’ roll bands do. That has something to do with not insulting their intelligence. So it just seems right to have two women in the band. Why should a band consist of six men?

While other musicians, including percussionist Ricardo Torres, would contribute to Night and Day, the basic tracks for the album were laid down live by Jackson, Maby, Tolfree, and Hadjopoulos. “We started with banging down a basic track with Larry, Graham and Sue, and me playing the piano,” Jackson told Mix in October 1983. “Then I just overdubbed all the keyboards.”

Blue Rock’s inventory included a Steinway piano, Hammond organ, and Fender Rhodes electric piano, all of which would be used to great effect by Jackson. “We had a good Steinway grand piano at the studio,” Ewasko recalled. “It was in beautiful shape, and it recorded beautifully. That’s the primary piano that he used.” To provide a richer, more impactful piano sound, Jackson often double-tracked his parts. “We [doubled some of the acoustic piano parts with a Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano] sometimes,” he told Mix, “and sometimes it was an acoustic piano double-tracked. A lot of the time it’s just a plain old acoustic piano. The engineer’s good, and he knows his studio.”

Despite Night and Day’s emphasis on keys, Jackson resisted voguish synthesizers. “I didn’t want to make a synthesizer album,” he explained:

I saw the Human League and Depeche Mode in the same evening once, and by the end of the night I was so sick of rhythm boxes and synthesizers that I went home and listened to Duke Ellington albums to cheer myself up. It wasn’t that I disliked either of those bands — I think they’re good at what they do — but I think synthesizers and rhythm boxes have become as cliched as guitar, bass, and drums, and even more quickly.

I’m just going to use a bit of synthesizer here or there if I think it sounds right. I don’t want that all-electronic, rather-sterile sound. I want it to sound a bit more real and gutsy than that. That’s why there’s more piano and percussion up front. The vocal is the most important thing, really — the melody. I have nothing against drum machines or synthesizer bands, but I want the music to sound human.

Even though Jackson often cited Steely Dan as one of the few contemporary rock artists he admired, he resisted the take-by-take hairsplitting favored by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. “Everything I do is geared to live performance rather than recording…,” he told Mix. “It seems we’re at a point where most people regard recording as the important thing — and the thing they want to do most — and touring as the necessary evil. I’m really more the other way around…. The way to do it [record] is to have everything rehearsed, bang it down as quickly as possible and get out…. We rehearsed Night and Day and learned it pretty quickly, then we went in and did it.”

The studio setup for Night and Day was fairly typical for a Blue Rock session. While Ewasko couldn’t recall the specifics some 40 years later, he suggested that it likely wasn’t that dissimilar from this photo:

Credit: Photo by Wikipedia user Bolígrafo (CC BY 4.0).

“The studio photo shows a fairly basic layout with [the] drum kit on a platform to the rear of the studio, furthest from the control room window,” he explained. “The piano was generally about mid room off to the right side. Most other instruments would be placed and baffled as needed.”

Some of the instruments and microphones used on the session, though, can be glimpsed on the inside of Night and Day’s sleeve:

Credit: Night and Day gatefold. Scan by Vinyl Gourmet.

“The vinyl album opened up, and it had a picture of the studio inside,” Ewasko told me. “It’s a picture of all the equipment that was used on the record…. The photo was staged in [the] front of the studio with the control room behind them. [The] control room lights appear [to be] off so you can’t see much through the window.…. That’s not the way the room was arranged for recording. I don’t remember whose idea it was to fill the scene with equipment like that, but it was probably Joe’s idea.”

The sonic magic that’s made Night and Day such an enduring record — and an audiophile disc — lays less in the gear, however, than in the working relationship that developed between Jackson, Kershenbaum, and Ewasko. “Although it started out like most any other recording session, [Jackson] had a very good producer…,” Ewasko told me. “David was probably one of the better producers that I’ve worked with. He really knew how to get the most out of his artist…. He knew when Joe was as best, and that really worked in making that album as good as it turned out…. [In terms of] the sound quality of the record, I’m not sure there was anything [we did] so extreme. But between the three of us, we managed to get really nice sounds.”

The first sound on Night and Day is the full, resonant whomp of Larry Tolfree’s floor tom, which kicks off a tom/hi-hat/snare pattern that suggests something Rick Marotta might’ve dreamed up for a Steely Dan or Boz Scaggs session. Tolfree’s metronic groove is soon set into sharp relief by Hadjopoulos’s limber timbales and Torres’s funky cowbell. The contrast creates an inescapable momentum that leads to the chaotic ascending piano riff of “Another World.” After just two rounds, the riff quickly drops away and is replaced with a cyclical three-note bassline, which is punctuated by a warbling, reverb-drenched keyboard flourish mixed far right. At last, Jackson’s fervent voice appears:

I was so low
People almost made me give up trying
Always said no
Then I turned around saw someone smiling

They’re the type of plainspoken opening lines that are uplifting, deceptively simple, and surprisingly hard to come by. Just as with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” on Crosby, Stills, and Nash or “Breathe” on Dark Side of the Moon, “Another World” invites the listener into the record:

I stepped into
I stepped into
Into another
Into another
I stepped into
I stepped into
Into another
Into another world

The mantra-like repetition of the chorus gives way to an eastern-tinged xylophone pattern from Hadjopoulos. Then Jackson reenters with another confession that moves from despair to joy:

There was no light
I was going to all the wrong places
Like day from night
Suddenly I saw a thousand faces

The ambiguity of the lyrics allows them to convey a universal message about the hope inherent in stepping outside of one’s comfort zone, as well as the ability of social connection to provide succor to the depressed. As he told Walker, “I was trying to just capture a feeling of when no matter how bad things are you can sometimes just think, ‘Well actually, you know what? it’s alright. It’ll be alright!’ It could be anything. Someone smiles at you, some little thing happens, and your mood changes. And I just wanted to capture that moment. So it’s just an optimistic song.”

Though Jackson dissuades listeners from autobiographical interpretations, it’s hard not to imagine that “Another World” conveys how NYC’s cultural life buoyed Jackson’s spirits during his self-imposed exile. “I don’t think it would have been possible to do [Night and Day] in Britain,” he told Classic Pop. “It was a very New York-influenced album. It’s just that my vision of New York wasn’t the same as the Ramones. It was very much the Latin world and the jazz world.”

Indeed, while he resisted the term “concept album,” there’s no doubt that Jackson intended Night and Day to be a song cycle about New York City. The album’s front cover features an illustration of Jackson by Philip Burke in front of the city’s skyline, while the back sleeve informs the listener that Night and Day was “written and recorded in New York City.”

The lyric sheet also provides a narrative guide to the listener, referring to the album’s first half as the “Night Side” and the second as the “Day Side.” As Jackson explained in a promotional interview published in Billboard, the album’s arc is meant to capture a day in the city:

Since moving to the city, I’ve seen many bizarre things while walking the streets. There is an amazing wealth and diversity of music going on here. I was describing a mood, a feeling of optimism. I feel this album is very optimistic. All the really up-tempo stuff is called the “Night Side,” whereas the ballads are on the “Day Side.” Nighttime represents excitement. Daytime is when you have to cope with life and think about what’s happening…. This album is a 50/50 mix, which I think is nice. If you feel in the mood to listen to some ballads, you can just put the “Day Side” on.

The exuberant “Another World” gives way to Night and Day’s second track, the discordant “Chinatown.” The mood shift is underscored by the fact that, like all of the tracks on the album’s “Night Side,” the former crossfades into the latter. According to Jackson, “I thought [the overlap between tracks] would make it that much more intense — like being in a club where every record cross-fades into the next. The poor, unfortunate listener doesn’t have a chance to collect his thoughts — or take a breath!” While it certainly succeeds on that count, not everyone involved with the album’s production was a fan of that decision. “The very first [copy of the] vinyl album I had was either a demo album or a radio station album, and every track was distinctly separate, like a normal record,” Ewasko told me. “But on the record that finally got released to the public, the songs faded from one to the other, which I didn’t like. That wasn’t something I did. That was not something that left my studio that way. That was something that they did in the record-cutting process.”

Even more than most songs on the eclectic Night and Day, “Chinatown” mixes sonic elements from unexpected sources. As the New York Times’ Stephen Holden put it, the track “combines an Afro-Cuban conga rhythm with a Brazilian tom-tom pattern and a Turkish melody line.”

Lyrically, “Chinatown” describes the out-of-town Jackson taking a wrong turn while trying to locate a Chinese restaurant. As the song progresses, the signs of squalor noted by the disorientated pedestrian escalate from a panhandling to homelessness before arriving at the darkly absurd specter of:

A guy laid out
With a knife in his back
A cop came along
Told him, move on
Go home and sleep it off

Part of what makes “Chinatown” so compelling is Jackson’s willingness to portray himself as a wide-eyed naïf lost in the ghetto. This narrative conceit sets up the song’s self-consciously melodramatic lyrics, which both reflect and satirize New York City’s image at the dawn of the 1980s.

The city that Jackson fell in love with while writing Night and Day was far different from the glimmering image of post-WWII prosperity that enchanted The Beatles some two decades earlier. Government-subsidized white flight, deindustrialization, and urban renewal hollowed out the city’s tax base. Its unemployment and poverty rates, which had hovered around the national average for decades, exploded. Crime soared. By 1975, the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Unions representing the city’s police and firefighters — who, like all city employees, faced the possibility of mass layoffs — blanketed New York with a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York.” As writer Kevin Baker recalled, “It’s difficult to convey just how precarious, and paranoid, life in New York felt around that time. Signs everywhere warned you to mind your valuables, and to keep neck chains or other jewelry tucked away while on the subway.”

Collapsing rents and abandoned buildings created fertile ground for the growth of punk, disco, salsa, and hip-hop. The type of city that appealed to artists like Jackson, however, wasn’t necessarily the kind that attracted homebuyers, businesses, and tourists. The Giuliani and Bloomberg eras revived the city’s image as a destination for out-of-towners and capital investment. But it alienated Jackson, who fled to Berlin. “I never had any trouble [in New York],” he told Walker in 2019:

I had more trouble growing up in Portsmouth with sailors and so on…. I’m quite nostalgic for [the NYC of the early-’80s], I must admit, even though I try to avoid nostalgia. It was definitely a rougher, dirtier, more dangerous place [than it is today]. But at the same time, it was much more fun, it was much more relaxed, and it was more friendly, which seems a little bit contradictory, but as long as you used common sense and stayed out of obviously dodgy places, it was just fine. It was much nicer than it is now, actually.

Ultimately, “Chinatown” succeeds precisely because Jackson waits until the final verse to deliver the song’s “sleep it off” punchline. Up until that point, the listener could easily be fooled into thinking that “Chinatown” is little more than the “Fear City” pamphlet set a melody. As with Steely Dan or Randy Newman, without close listening, it can be difficult to discern which of Jackson’s sentiments are authentic and which are satire. “There’s a lot of humor in my songs and tongue-in-cheek lyrics,” Jackson lamented in 1983. “I don’t know whether it’s the public at large or just the critics, but it’s certainly apparent from a lot of reviews that people have missed the humor on Night And Day.”

Fittingly, the dry “Chinatown” flows into “T.V. Age,” Night and Day’s most overtly satirical track. Sonically, “T.V. Age” proves that Jackson could do anglicized Afrobeat every bit as well as the Talking Heads. Maby’s plump bass, mixed high in the center, and Hadjopoulos’s percussion, placed strategically across the stereo field, impart an undeniable momentum to “T.V. Age.” According to Hadjopoulos, Jackson gave her wide latitude in devising her parts, which she sought to integrate into each track’s overall sonic mood:

[“T.V. Age”] has a very mechanized kind of sound…. I listened to the song, and I was like, “Well, this is very 1984. [It’s the] T.V. age and everything’s mechanized.” So I wanted something that was like a repetitive kind of mechanical sound. Since I had everything set up in a row behind the baffle… I played bongos, congas, timbales, left to right… down the line… and percussion on the side on both sides. So I came up with this part, and I was using sticks, which was kind of unusual. I was doing a repetitive part on bongos [imitates part] and going down to [imitates part] timbales [imitates part again].

Set against this propulsive energy, the chanted lyrics take on an overtly didactic tone:

Here we stand
(Remote control buttons in our sweaty little hands)
As one man
(We’re lining up and waiting for someone’s command)
We don’t move
(We sent out for food, get the news on video)
I can prove
(There’s no need for movies, we got HBO)
In the
T.V. age

At first blush, “T.V. Age” is a simple anti-television jeremiad. However, the lyrics reach absurdity even more quickly than those of the comparatively subtle “Chinatown.” While the first verse follows Network’s portrayal of viewers as docile lemmings, the second anticipates They Live’s vision of extraterrestrials infiltrating the media in order to enslave the public. “The aliens have to take a physical form on our planet,” the deep-mixed vocal intones. “So why not one with 13 channels?”

The lyrics’ fanciful turn is matched by a rhythmic downshift and a sweetening of the melody. Tolfree’s metronomic drums and Maby’s stilted basslines relax into a Funk Brothers-esque groove. Jackson’s angular piano and Hadjopoulos’s dramatic percussion drop away. “It was very rigid or until you get to the middle section, which was very etheric,” Hadjopoulos recalled in 2021, “and that was like a lot of bells and chimes, and I actually played some flute on there.” That heavenly vibe is accentuated by the choir of childlike voices that deliver the news of the alien invasion. Beneath the choir, Jackson’s wild alto sax suggests a whimsical acceptance of humanity’s fate. Taken together, “TV Age” comes across like a Devo-devised mashup of “I Zimbra,” “Another Brick in the Wall,” and “Jungleland.” It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Propelled by a shimmering Latin piano figure in the right channel and Hadjopoulos’s bustling percussion, the fourth track on Night and Day, “Target,” expands on the themes previously explored in “Chinatown.” “I’m one of these people who likes to walk around and just observe,” he noted 2019. “I was always doing that, and people always [told] me, ‘What? You went where? You’re not supposed to go there. It’s dangerous.’”

The track’s first verse serves as a riposte to those warnings:

Somebody say I’m crazy
Walking in this neighborhood
Say you can’t be too careful
But that won’t do no good

However, as the song progresses, it’s clear that Jackson’s infatuation with his adopted city was punctured, at least a bit, by the omnipresent threat of gun violence:

I’m no one special
But any part of town
Someone could smile at me then
Shake my hand then gun me down

As he told Chris Welch in 1982, “Sometimes when you are walking about the street, you just get scared. It was partly inspired by Lennon getting shot…. That song is about the paranoia of being on the street and thinking, ‘Anyone can pull out a gun and shoot me at any moment.’ I don’t feel like that all time, or else I couldn’t handle it. I love living in New York.”

The song’s final verse reflects Jackson’s uneasy ambivalence:

I know what I’m doing
I’m happy day to day
But then something happens
Takes my nerve away

This seemingly pessimistic conclusion, however, arrives less than halfway through the track’s runtime, and it’s countered by the joy of Night and Day’s most overtly Salsa-influenced passage. With some inspired Hammond vamps, Jackson builds the band to a furious crescendo. As it recedes, Hadjopoulos and Torres unleash a percussive assault, expertly recorded by Ewasko and mixed by Kershenbaum. All the while, a two-note bassline from Maby, doubled on piano by Jackson, churns below. It, too, drops away momentarily, leaving Hadjopoulos and Torres to carry the track before the rest of the band crashes back in and build towards the final chorus.

While left unsaid by the lyrics, the structure of “Target” underscores Jackson’s belief that — whatever dangers may have lurked in New York City’s dark alleyways — the thrill of the music made it a risk worth taking.

“Target” gives way to “Steppin’ Out,” the final track of Night and Day’s “Night Side” — and the album’s biggest hit. “One of the first songs I wrote for… Night and Day was ‘Steppin’ Out,’” Jackson told the Wall Street Journal’s Meyers. “I was inspired by New York. I envisioned playing a diverse range of keyboards. I wanted them to conjure up the dazzle of neon lights and the feel of cabbing from club to club to take it all in. It would be a romantic ballad set to a disco beat.”

Given Jackson’s modest use of contemporary technology on Night and Day, the most conspicuous element of “Steppin’ Out” is its insouciant electronic drumbeat. Jackson employed the three-year-old Korg KR-55 drum machine for the track’s mechanized kick, hi-hat, and snare, which served as the foundation of “Steppin’ Out” from Jackson’s Master Sound demo through the final Blue Rock mix. For the latter, however, “drummer Larry Tolfree overdubbed a real snare drum on top of the fake one to give it an authentic sound,” as Jackson told the Wall Street Journal. On top of the rhythm provided by Tolfree and KR-55, Jackson layered a pulsing computerized bass. “For the bass, I used a Prophet-5 synthesizer,” he explained to Myers. “I liked Kraftwerk’s electronic dance beats and bass riffs on albums such as Computer World. I set the synth bass so it had a completely precise and metronomic sound.”

Jackson’s layered keyboards provide the melodic hook for “Steppin’ Out.” It’s introduced by a Fender Rhodes that bubbles up from below the already-thumping KR-55 and Prophet-5. As the Rhodes swells, the song’s introduction builds to a dry run of the chorus. Like Kraftwerk covering “Born to Run,” the hook is doubled by an echoing acoustic piano and tripled by a chiming glockenspiel as the Prophet-5 continues to convulse. “When Joe finished recording the music, it was air-tight,” Kershenbaum recalled. “He really nailed it.”

Just after the 35-second mark, Jackson’s vocal enters. His phrasing hangs on the first word of each verse, emphasizing the narrative’s shifting perspective. As he told Myers:

As soon as I finished the music, I wrote the words. I thought of a couple who had just fought and were making up. They were telling each other, “Let’s forget it and take advantage of the city. Let’s just throw ourselves into the night.” For me, lyrics have always been the hardest part of writing a song. I sweat over words. I don’t want them to sound dumb and clumsy and meaningless. So I did a lot of editing.

Except for the first verse, I started each with a different pronoun — me, we, you. I used them as cues for the narratives that followed. The lyrics were intuitive and had nothing to do with my personal life. They just felt right. The first verse set the scene: “Now / the mist across the window hides the lines / But nothing hides the color of the lights that shine / Electricity so fine / Look and dry your eyes.” The next verse urged the other person to forget the argument: “We / so tired of all the darkness in our lives / With no more angry words to say / can come alive / Get into a car and drive / to the other side.” The rest is about heading out and the anticipation of arriving at a club: “And in a yellow taxi you turn to me and smile / We’ll be there in just a while / If you follow me.”

Unusually, Jackson doesn’t sing on the chorus until the third pass. Even then, his vocal simply serves as another instrument following the already-established melodic hook. Each word corresponds to a strike of the piano and chime of the glockenspiel.

Despite — or perhaps because of — its unusual structure and enigmatic lyrics, “Steppin’ Out” became the most successful single from Night and Day and the highest-charting hit of Jackson’s career. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in late-August and stayed there for 27 weeks, peaking at number six and far surpassing “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” on both counts.

Ironically, if Jackson had his way, “Steppin’ Out” would not have become a single. “I remember having an argument with David Kershenbaum, my producer at the time, because he was the one who thought ‘Steppin’ Out’ was a single and it was going to be a hit,” he recalled in 2019. “And I said, ‘You’ve got to be joking. It’s not even going to get played on the radio.’ So, there you go. That shows you how much I know about it.”

Jackson’s short-lived dalliance with music videos also pushed “Steppin’ Out” up the charts. “Another one of the unique circumstances that made this album successful was it was the early days of MTV,” he told Walker. “And we made a video [for ‘Steppin’ Out’] that got played pretty heavily. So that made a big difference as well.”

Directed by Steve Barron — who would go on to shoot such iconic videos as Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing,” and a-ha’s “Take On Me” — the video for “Steppin’ Out” begins with evocative shots of New York City at dusk. As the sun dims, the city lights flash on, setting the scene for the story told by Jackson’s lyrics. However, instead of a couple having a night on the town, the video’s storyline begins with Jackson performing at a piano in an empty hotel room as a maid cleans around him. As Barron explained to Jackson:

We’ll keep it simple. We’ll have you as a ghost narrator at the piano, performing the song in a posh hotel. We’ll have a chambermaid coming to clean the posh suite. She finds some posh lady’s beautiful, sparkling, expensive dress on the bed. She goes to hang it up, but then it’s like every Cinderella’s dream. She’s drawn into taking a break from scrubbing the floors, tempted into seeing if that dress fits. Dreaming the princess dream. Dancing the princess dance.

As the maid’s imagination transports her to the chic ballroom where she dances with a tuxedo-clad beau, Jackson now appears at the ballroom piano in his own tuxedo. For somewhat obscure reasons, when the aforementioned beau arrives at the hotel room with his actual paramour, Jackson disappears from the room and the gentleman begins composing on the piano. It’s not exactly a particularly nuanced or relevant plot, which perhaps explained why Jackson would make few videos in the future. But it helped to get “Steppin’ Out” into the public consciousness.

“Steppin’ Out” closes the “night” side of Night and Day, while the “day” side opens with the album’s second-biggest hit, “Breaking Us in Two.” If the former chronicles a couple’s decision to put aside the night’s argument and go out on the town, the latter captures the heartache that awaits when they revisit to the underlying disagreement.

Driven by Jackson’s sparse, evocative piano and Tolfree’s jazzy drums, “Breaking Us in Two” eschews the driving groove of “Steppin’ Out” in favor of classic balladry. The track opens with a few staccato bass notes as Jackson pleads:

Don’t you feel like trying something new
Don’t you feel like breaking out
Or breaking us in two
You don’t do the things that I do
You want to do things I can’t do
Always something breaking us in two

“[‘Breaking Us in Two’ is] very hard to sing for some reason,” Jackson told Walker in 2019:

I have this problem sometimes when I’m writing. I’m sort of in the composer’s head, not in the singer’s head. And I kind of follow the logic of where the song seems to want to go. I’m trying to make a good song. And then at some point I have to say, “Okay, can I sing this?” And quite often, it’s not that easy. I don’t think the vocals are very good on the album. It’s okay, I guess. I was trying to write a song that was like some of the sort-of standard songs we were talking about — the Gershwin’s and so on. Rather than have a melody that was just a few little riffs, it was like a big arch, you know? This long soaring melody. [“Breaking Us in Two”] was my attempt at that…

Kershenbaum’s mix spreads Blue Rock’s Steinway across the stereo field. Jackson’s vocal and Tolfree’s kit are placed in the middle of the soundstage, while Maby’s superb bassline is panned slightly left of center. Hadjopoulos’s bongos, which recede only during the chorus, are panned far right. Other percussive elements — including a center-mixed triangle and left-mixed xylophone – dart in and out of the mix to provide emphasis to particular passages. The mid-track synth solo, which provides the rare ‘80s inflection to an otherwise timeless recording, is panned far left.

Unlike the cross-faded first half of Night and Day, the second side is divided into separate tracks. This slow fade suits “Breaking Us in Two,” which closes with the band grooving on a magnificent ascending piano line from Jackson.

Featuring its own narratively opaque video, “Breaking Us in Two” spent 16 weeks on the Billboard charts, rising to number 18.

The seventh cut on Night and Day, “Cancer,” breaks the melancholy spell cast by “Breaking Us in Two” with a heavy dose of satire. Like “Steppin’ Out,” the chorus of “Cancer” is based around a piano figure and vocal hook that mirror one another. Instead of rejoicing in the excitement of a night on the town, though, now Jackson inveighs, “Everything gives you cancer / There’s no cure, there’s no answer.” In the heavily Latin-inflected verses, Jackson catalogs the substances — caffeine, protein, booze, and nicotine — that must be avoided to preserve one’s health.

“People come up to me and say, ‘The lyrics to “Cancer” are so depressing, why did you put them to such a happy tune?’” he told Record’s Barry Alfonso in 1982. “Can’t they see it’s a joke, that even the way the words rhyme makes it funny? One of the problems I’ve had in the States is that people don’t understand my sense of humor. People probably miss humor in lyrics because so few people put any into what they write anymore.”

According to Jackson, the song’s meaning is “we are going to die anyway, so we might as well smoke, drink and have a good time,” a message that’s only slightly undercut by his well-known defense of smoking. (Of course, Jackson likely would find it equally absurd that anyone would take medical advice from a pop star.)

Beyond its sardonic lyrics, the strength of “Cancer” lies in the two-minute instrumental workout that begins near the 2:30 mark. Jackson’s thrilling runs on the Steinway and a panoply of percussion from Hadjopoulos and Torres combine to create the most compelling salsa-inspired moment on Night and Day. It’s capped off by a searing alto sax solo from Jackson before the track’s final verse and chorus.

The penultimate song on Night and Day, “Real Men,” is also one of its most insightful and affecting. It opens with Jackson’s lyrical piano, which picks up steam before the Korg KR-55 enters and sets the pace for the rest of the track. Over the piano, electronic drumbeat, and a small string section, Jackson sings:

Take your mind back, I don’t know when
Some time when it always seemed to be just us and them
Girls that wore pink and boys that wore blue
Boys that always grew up better men than me and you

What’s a man now? What’s a man mean?
Is he rough or is he rugged?
Is he cultural and clean?
Now it’s all changed, it’s got to change more
‘Cause we think it’s getting better
But nobody’s really sure

The chorus begins with the couplet “And so it goes, go ‘round again / But now and then we wonder who the real men are” followed by soaring “whoah-oooh” vocals over a pounding staccato piano, the combination of which demonstrates how effectively Jackson had imbibed the anthemic grandiosity of Specter and Springsteen and interpolated it into his own music.

In the second verse, Jackson’s observations about the intersection of masculinity and sexuality become even more pointed:

See the nice boys, dancing in pairs
Golden earring, golden tan, blow wave in their hair
Sure, they’re all straight, straight as a line
All the gays are macho
Can’t you see the leather shine?

You don’t want to sound dumb, don’t want to offend
So don’t call me a faggot
Not unless you are a friend
Then if you’re tall and handsome and strong
You can wear the uniform and I could play along

At the time of Night and Day, Jackson had said little about his own sexuality beyond referencing then-girlfriend and future-wife, Ruth, in interviews. His explanation of “Real Men” to journalist Penny Harding in 1982 emphasized the song’s critique of enforced gender stereotypes more than its sardonic takedown of homophobia. “[‘Real Men’ is] a particularly sad song because there are a lot of confused guys out there,” he said:

There’s certainly a big difference between how a male reacts naturally in an emotional sense and how society deems a male is supposed to react. Even now, in the Eighties, boys are still told to play with tanks and soldiers and told not to cry, and girls with dolls and dresses. Such an old-fashioned concept, and so stupid. This so-called difference between people is forced down your throat.

It was easy to see how the slight, impishly nerdy Jackson could relate personally to the song’s first verse, whereas the message of the second verse likely came across to perceptive listeners in 1982 as a particularly insightful message of allyship from Jackson. But in his 1999 autobiography, Jackson wrote of his lifelong attraction to both sexes, recalled being slandered as “a poof or a queer” in childhood, and came out as bisexual. In a 2001 in-depth interview with the Irish Independent, Jackson spoke of his then-current relationship with a man and how his sexuality had evolved over his life. “I didn’t decide. I’ve always been fluid, in-between, never made any big decision about it,” he said:

In fact, even when I decided, with [early girlfriend] Jill, “I must be straight,” it wasn’t that I felt it’s better to be straight than gay. Even from an early age I didn’t see anything wrong with being who you are. I just didn’t know who I was. Sexually. But now that I’m in my 40s, certain things seem obvious that didn’t before. I think I was always bisexual, which I also think is a very natural thing to be. And my problems were not so much within myself as, “How am I going to fit in with other people? Or find a partner, be perceived and work this out in the world?” I had no problem being what I was. It was just the question of other people having a problem with that.

In hindsight then, the second verse of “Real Men” becomes just as autobiographical as the first. Indeed, Jackson revisited his critique of gay men who seemed to be just as disdainful of femininity as the average misogynist in his 2003 song “Fairy Dust.” As he explained in an interview that year:

I see the gay identity has become more and more about being so masculine that you’re more straight than the straight guys. And this is something that I find quite funny. I sort of get it, and at the same time, I don’t like it that much. It’s mixed feelings. And if we’re talking about stereotypes, then I guess what I’m saying in the song [“Fairy Dust”] is that I almost prefer the older stereotype, this sort of Oscar Wilde/Quentin Crisp gay stereotype. I almost prefer that to the more-straight-than-straight stereotype.

The third and final verse of “Real Men” trades the-personal-is-political autobiography for a prescient analysis of the “Men’s Rights Movement”-type mentality that’s migrated from the boardrooms and barrooms of the 1980s to the online “manosphere“ of the 2010s and places of political power and social influence today:

Time to get scared, time to change plan
Don’t know how to treat a lady
Don’t know how to be a man
Time to admit what you call defeat
‘Cause there’s women running past you now
And you just drag your feet

Man makes a gun, man goes to war
Man can kill and man can drink
And man can take a whore
Kill all the blacks, kill all the reds
And if there’s war between the sexes
Then there’ll be no people left

As Jackson told Harding, “All that women’s lib stuff in the Sixties changes attitudes around, but there are still some brainless blokes who’ve had their supremacy and masculinity threatened, and they just wander around aimlessly not having a clue on how to act or think, which is very, very sad.”

Night and Day closes with the tender piano ballad “Slow Song.” Whereas Jackson’s “Angry Young” compatriot Elvis Costello famously lambasted DJ’s for monotonous payola-driven playlists on “Radio, Radio,” Jackson declares himself “brutalized by bass and terrorized by treble” and begs the DJ to play music suitable for a conciliatory dance.

Thematically, it’s hard not to see “Slow Song” as the culmination of the couple’s story began in “Steppin’ Out” and continued in “Breaking Us in Two.” The couple’s night on the town and contentious conversation have culminated in a music-aided attempt at reconciliation.

Over a delicate piano figure, a swirling organ, and Maby and Tolfree’s sympathetically soulful rhythmic foundation, Jackson pleads with a DJ who’s been pumping out upbeat rock:

You see my friend and me
Don’t have an easy day
And at night we dance not fight
And we need the energy
If not the sympathy

But I’m brutalized by bass
And terrorized by treble
I’m open to change my mood but
I always get caught in the middle

A stately, stereo-mixed string section enters on the chorus as Jackson pleads with the DJ to “play us a slow song.” As he told Welch in 1982, “It’s very romantic, about being in a club late at night with someone, and you just wish the deejay would play a slow song, just because you’re really in the mood for it when you’re being bombarded with disco. It’s about a romantic longing. It’s not about ‘the airwaves are full of crap, I’m gonna set ‘em all straight.’ I’ll leave those kind of lyrics to Elvis Costello.”

In the next verse, Jackson explains the need for a conciliatory dance. Just as the listener is approaching the end of the album, so, too, is the couple chronicled by Jackson nearing the end of the contentious evening and, possibly, their relationship:

It’s late, I’m winding down
Am I the only one
To want a strong and silent sound
To pick me up and undress me
Lay me down and caress me

I feel you touch my hand
And whisper in my ear
Ask me how I’m feeling now
And I want to get near you

But I can’t even hear you

But this is a fine romance
If we have to be so demanding
We need just one more dance to
Leave here with an understanding

The track — and the album — close with two runs through the chorus and a slow fade.

Mixing of Night and Day took only “a day or two,” according to Kershenbaum. However, two elements of the process stood out to Ewasko.

The first was how Kershenbaum created the composite tracks for Jackson’s vocals. “One of the techniques that was kind of unique to that record was that David had me build a little box — a little electronic box — with five inputs and one output,” Ewasko remembered:

It was switchable…. What he would do was record [Joe’s] vocal in five different passes…. David would actually then create a composite vocal from the five [takes]. A lot of times, that’s done where they may go in and punch-in a line [for] one line that didn’t sound so good…. [But] David would [have Joe sing] five complete passes…. They’re all pretty much identical, but there’re slight nuances between them. David could see that one [take’s moment] was better than the others. He would sit there, and we would build a composite vocal track from the five recorded tracks. He was physically [using the box to] switch them in and out, in and out — sometimes, even on a word. [He might prefer] a word from one track over another track, you know? I mean, really nitpicking it. But he was so good at knowing what was Joe’s best performance at any given time that he was able to do that [switching]. It may have been time consuming, but he was able to sit there and pull out the best line, phrase, or word from each track and build a composite, which we would listen to, and if he thought he needed to improve on that, he would go back and put in another word or phrase until he came up with [another] composite. Doing that, the composite ends up sounding…. How can I explain it?  It’s almost like, if you were singing a song, the first line you sing after you take a breath has a unique quality to it that you lose on the second line and on the third line…. But when you do this [switching] while you’re making a composite, it’s almost like every line becomes the first line of a song…. He made a composite track that was like 110% of what Joe could do himself in any one pass....

The second unique mixing strategy that struck Ewasko was Kershenbaum’s choice of speakers for the mixing session. “Our studio had Altec Lansing studio monitor speakers for loud playing,” he told me:

But we used to use smaller speakers on the console, just for doing mixdowns and hearing what things sounded like on smaller, nearfield speakers — speakers that you sit closer to and listen to at a lower volume. And David Kirschenbaum had a set of speakers of his own… called “Little Davids.” They were just small little nearfield bookshelf speakers that sat on the console. They had a very unique, tight sound that we mixed the whole album through. I fell in love with them as mixdown speakers. They sounded very true. They didn’t alter the sound any. Whether or not that made any real difference, I kind of always in the back of my head I thought it did. I ended up using those speakers afterwards myself. I would have a pair at home.

Made by the German company Visonik, the first models in the David line were introduced in 1977. The award-winning David 50 — likely the model used by Kershenbaum — featured a sealed aluminum cabinet that housed a 4-inch woofer and ¾-inch tweeter. As Lucio Cadeddu noted in a recent retrospective review, the David 50 was the smallest speaker to meet the DIN 45500, a set of performance standards for hi-fi equipment developed in Germany in 1966 that limited allowable frequency response deviations and distortion levels.

Like Ewasko, Kershenbaum saw mixing through the “Little Davids” as crucial. “Back then, I traveled with a pair of 6-inch tall German Visonik David DIN 45 500 monitor speakers,” he remembered in 2018:

They were small — the size of paperback books. But they had the depth and dimension of much larger speakers. Monitor speakers in the studio could be deceptive, causing you to worry just about a song’s components. I wanted all of it to stand out. As I mixed the tape, I put my head between the Davids to hear what the finer detail sounded like.

I heard [“Steppin’ Out”] for the first time in the summer of ‘82, in a store in L.A. It was playing softly. I remember thinking how glad I was that I mixed it on those small speakers. Every aspect of the song came through.

Night and Day hit record store shelves on June 25, 1982, beginning its march up the charts and ascent to gold status in the U.S. and U.K. and platinum status in several other countries.

Now comes the technical nerdery. Which digital version of Night and Day should audiophiles seek out?

1. The original CD of Night and Day was released in 1983 or 1984. Like many early CDs, this release lacks a mastering credit and was reissued several times throughout the 1980s and early-1990s, usually (but not always) with “4906” somewhere in the catalog number.
2. In 1990, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab released its own gold “Ultradisc” CD remaster of Night and Day.
3. Night and Day was remastered by Roger Wake for A&M in 1997. These discs can be easily identified by the “Digitally Remastered” banner on front of the spine and the small credit to Wake on the back cover.
4. In 2003, Night and Day was reissued as a 2CD “Deluxe Edition“ featuring the original album, six of Jackson’s demos, the five non-instrumental tracks written by Jackson for the 1983 film Mike’s Murder, and five live tracks from the Night and Day tour, which were previously included on 1988’s Live 1980/86 release. The credits for the “Deluxe Edition” state that the album was “96K/24-bit mastered from the original analog master tapes by Erick Labson at Universal Mastering Studios-East.”
5. The final, as of this writing, mastering of Night and Day came in 2007 as part of the rare Japan-only The A&M Years 1979-1989 box set. For this release, Night and Day was remastered by Hitoshi Takiguchi.

Let’s start by taking a look at each version’s dynamic range, measured by both R128 dynamic range and crest factor DR scores:

The first two releases are the most dynamic, while the last three appear to be more compressed. Of those three, the 1997 release seems most likely to be over-compressed, at least based on the numbers.

To get a better sense of just how compressed those three versions are, here’s what three level-matched tracks from the MFSL, 1997, 2003, and 2007 versions look like in Audacity:

Based on the waveforms, none of the versions is quite “brickwalled,” but at least one sampled track on the 1997 and 2007 mastering, respectively, come close. On the other hand, while the 2003 mastering is clearly more compressed than the MFSL disc, it appears to have moderate peak limiting, rather than heavy compression. Given that there’s only five distinct digital masterings of Night and Day, I’m not going to eliminate any based on dynamics.

The first matchup will pit the original early-’80s CD against the 1990 Mobile Fidelity disc. As usual, I used Har-Bal to precisely level-match all versions, and for my subjective analysis, I’ll use Audacity to instantaneously switch between each version by time-aligning the level-matched files.** To get a sense of each version’s frequency response, the graph below shows Har-Bal’s “average power” graphs for all of the tracks on the original CD (orange) and the MFSL (pink):

These masterings are very similarly balanced. Generally speaking, the original CD has a bit more energy above 1 kHz on most tracks, and the MFSL has a little more low end. The original CD also seems to have a 20 Hz hum on all tracks.

How do they sound?

Beginning with “Another World,” I appreciate the extra low-end heft on the MFSL disc, a difference that sounds more substantial than the graph implies. In comparison, the original CD sounds a bit bass-light, even through transducers with ample mid- and sub-bass response. However, the original CD projects just a smidge wider soundstage, thanks to a bit more reverb tail on the far left- and right-mixed xylophone. That said, the Mobile Fidelity mastering seems to best the original disc in overall detail retrieval on this track. The tight snare in the song’s intro, for example, simply sounds more nuanced and three-dimensional on the MFSL disc, compared to the somewhat flatter, more synthetic-sounding portrayal on the early-’80s disc.

Many of the same observations about “Another World” can be copied and pasted to “Steppin’ Out.” However, on this track, the slight difference in soundstage width is even smaller, while the differences in low-end response and overall resolution are greater, decisively tilting the contest in favor of the MFSL. It simply wrings more detail out of the recording. Jackson’s layered vocals on the chorus, for example, are much easier to dissect when listening to the MoFi CD than to the original disc.

Adding “Real Men” to the analysis delivers the knockout block in the MFSL’s favor. Not only does the Mobile Fidelity’s more impactful low end benefit this track’s dramatic chorus, but everything from the low-mixed synth to the small string section sounds more realistic on the MFSL CD. While the original CD is by no means a poor mastering, it can’t compete with the Mobile Fidelity disc.

Now the 1997 Roger Wake remaster (purple) takes on the MoFi disc (pink):

Unlike the original CD versus the MFSL, these two masterings are very different. Wake’s mastering tends to have more energy around 200 Hz, a scoop in the mids from around 500 Hz to 2 kHz, and a strong boost above 3 kHz.

Aurally, these differences are obvious and dramatic. Starting again with “Another World,” I discovered that the 1997 disc has an extra few bars to the intro. However, that’s easily taken care of when time-aligning the versions in Audacity. The 1997 CD tends to make the track’s distinctive floor tom thump sound a bit hollow and the xylophone a little brittle. Certain midrange-centric elements in the arrangement, like the deep-mixed organ, almost disappear on the 1997 disc. Combined with the latter’s reduced dynamics, it’s not a very enticing mastering.

Moving on to “Steppin’ Out,” it’s a little easier to hear what Wake was going for with his 1997 remaster. It creates a more modern, high-contrast sound. However, it again comes at the price of significantly changing the tonality of some instruments — away from their nature timbre — and pulling some elements out of the mix while burying others. It’s an interesting presentation, but not necessarily one that’s accurate to what Jackson, Kershenbaum, and Ewasko created at Blue Rock in 1982.

Given the 1997 disc’s radically different presentation, I was curious how it would render a relatively straightforward arrangement like “Breaking Us in Two.” As I suspected, it takes the studio’s Steinway and makes it sound more like a cheap keyboard while making Jackson’s vocal simultaneously throatier and more sibilant. It’s not a good combination. Wake’s 1997 remaster, then, is an easy cut.

The Mobile Fidelity CD (pink) now faces Labson’s 2003 “Deluxe Edition” remaster (blue):

Based on the graphs, these two masterings should sound relatively similar. The 2003 CD has a bit more energy in the 3 to 5 kHz range, as well as more sub-bass. But otherwise, they track each other closely.

Subjectively, the two sound much more distinct. Beginning, as usual, with “Another World,” Labson’s 2003 mastering sounds more detailed without upsetting the tonality of any element in the mix. It also projects a much wider soundstage. The combination of the 2003 disc’s extra detail and greater width makes it easier to dissect the mix.

Curious about the source of the extra width, I decided to take a look at each mastering’s “side” equalization, since the standard Har-Bal “average power” graph looks at the “mid” tonality. Often, these two views are incredibly similar. But there can be differences, sometimes significant ones. Here’s what a few tracks look like from the “side” perspective:

We can see that Labson’s 2003 mastering has significantly more energy on the sides than the MFSL disc does and, occasionally, a bit different tonal balance. It’s this extra side energy that projects a wider soundstage. While I didn’t show it, had I presented a similar “side” comparison for the original early-’80s CD versus the MFSL, we’d have seen similar, if less dramatic, differences that create the former’s slightly wider soundstage. The source of these side differences — tape source, transfer quality, intentional EQ — is hard to say. (I’ve reached out to Labson to ask him for his memories of mastering the “Deluxe” Night and Day but haven’t heard back.) However, in my humble opinion these “side” changes benefit Night and Day, even if they’re not the sole source of the “Deluxe” CD’s edge.

Is the MFSL disc suddenly a bad mastering? No. Does it pale in comparison to the “Deluxe Edition”? Not quite. But it’s hard to deny that Labson’s mastering simply sounds more “high fidelity.” Hearing Jackson’s aforementioned vocal overdubs on the chorus, for example, is significantly easier on the “Deluxe” CD than the MFSL disc. Likewise, both the initial attack and the decay of the wide-mixed xylophones sound more realistic on Labson’s mastering. Perhaps the biggest beneficiary is Hadjopoulos’s percussion, which is rendered with much more nuance on the “Deluxe” disc. Even Maby’s nifty bass fill right before the fadeout has crisper transients and better string articulation. This increased resolution is aided by the extra soundstage width, but it also simply sounds like the tape transfer used by Labson is superior to the one used by MFSL. (Sometimes an extra decade-plus of analog-to-digital technological advancement matters.)

Turning to “Steppin’ Out,” the overall tonal differences between these two masterings don’t seem quite as stark. However, the 2003 disc again simply sounds more detailed and projects a wider soundstage. On this track, moreover, the difference in the soundstage depth is striking. In comparison, the MFSL CD’s image comes across as a bit flat. The Korg drumbeat, for example, stages deeper on the “Deluxe” CD while also holding more detail.

On “Breaking Us in Two,” each mastering’s tonality is, again, similar. But everything from Jackson’s voice to Tolfree’s kit sounds just a bit more detailed.

Given that the main knock against Labson’s mastering is that it is less dynamic than the MFSL CD, I was curious to compare how each disc presents the dynamic “Real Men.” On the intro and verse, the “Deluxe” CD again has the edge on detail and soundstage. However, when it comes to the chorus — particularly Tolfree’s dramatic kick drum — the MoFi’s edge in dynamics is apparent.

Would I prefer Labson’s mastering had the MFSL’s dynamics? Yes. Does the latter’s dynamic advantage outweigh the former’s edge in fidelity? In my opinion, no. While audiophiles tend to gravitate towards the release with the highest dynamic range for good reason, it’s hard to get around the fact that the “Deluxe Edition” simply out-resolves the MFSL.

While the Mobile Fidelity gold CD still has its strengths, the “Deluxe Edition” unseats it.

That leaves Labson’s “Deluxe” mastering (blue) to face Takiguchi’s mastering from the extremely rare 2007 A&M Years box set (red):

While these are very different masterings, it’s a little difficult to summarize their differences. However, the 2007 version’s equalization, such as that 20 Hz bump, look familiar. Here’s how the original CD (orange) compares with the 2007 disc (red) in Har-Bal:

Is this actually just the original CD master with a bass boost? Possibly. Putting the same track from the two discs into Audacity, it’s clear that track splits for the album’s crossfaded “Night Side” aren’t the same. However, songs from the “Day Side” align perfectly and stay in sync throughout each track.

How does that extra low end sound? Not great. Particularly on transducers with ample sub-bass response (roughly in line with the “Harman Curve“), such as the critically lauded ThieAudio Monarch MKII IEM, the bass boost is simply overwhelmingly boomy. Even on those with a more modest (but still within the bounds of “neutral”) sub-bass, such as my beloved Moondrop Kato, it can veer into bloat.

Beyond the low end, Takiguchi’s mastering just isn’t as resolving as Labson’s. On “Steppin’ Out,” for example, the overlapping snare thwack provided by Tolfree and the Korg morph into one flat, amorphous noise on the former, while they’re distinct and crisply reverberant on the latter. Jackson vocal overdubs on the chorus are likewise more difficult to distinguish on the 2007 disc versus the 2003, while the glockenspiel is just more tonally correct and three-dimensional on the latter.

In short, it’s not a close call. Labson’s mastering on the 2003 “Deluxe Version” is much better than Takiguchi’s on the 2007 A&M Years CD. Indeed, the Mobile Fidelity disc is also clearly better than the 2007 CD.

Given that, the Labson-mastered 2003 “Deluxe Edition” of Night and Day is the winner of the TBVO crown. In addition to being the best-sounding version of the album, the “Deluxe Edition” also includes Jackson’s superb demos, which are worth hearing even for casual fans. While neither the Mike’s Murder tracks nor the live versions are unique to the “Deluxe Edition,” it’s nice to have both included in this set. The former, in particular, sound like a logical extension of Jackson’s Night and Day material. Finally, the packaging and liner notes for “Deluxe Edition” are far and away superior to any other digital version of Night and Day.

For those who value dynamics above detail, though, the MFSL gold CD is an excellent second choice.

Perhaps a future hi-resolution version of Night and Day will combine the Mobile Fidelity’s dynamics with the Labson mastering’s clarity. But until then, audiophiles looking for the best digital mastering of Night and Day should pick up the “Deluxe” and/or MoFi release(s).

The early-’80s aren’t known for having produced a bevy of audiophile-worthy albums. But in a small, now-defunct studio in New York City, Kershenbaum, Ewasko, Jackson, and the rest of the band created a recording that not only separated Jackson from his “Angry Young Men” peers and catapulted him to the top of the charts but also belongs in the collection of any rock- and pop-loving audiophile.

“I found [recording Night and Day] extremely enjoyable, extremely rewarding,” Ewasko told me:

It’s one of two gold records that I got to my name out of Blue Rock Studio. I enjoyed it from start to finish and was very happy with the results and the resulting comments that I would see in print or [hear] from other musicians, who would rave about the sound.

There was something about it that translated well to radio. “Steppin’ Out,” for sure, and I think the second-biggest hit was “Breaking Us in Two,” if I’m not mistaken. They translated well to radio. The percussion and the sound of piano cuts through the crummiest of speakers in cars and transistor radios. It was a good, fresh sound. That’s really why most people liked it. It just sounded good, whether you were a Joe Jackson fan or not.

Actually, I was really unaware of Joe Jackson at the time I did that album. I wasn’t familiar with his stuff. I’d heard a couple of songs on the radio, but I was not really a Joe Jackson fan, so to speak. But learned to appreciate the talent that Joe had, for sure, both as a performer and as a songwriter and musician….

I think, overall, everyone involved in the studio was happy with the results, because it all seemed to generate positive feedback — from people that listened, from people that played on it. Everybody was happy with it. When it was certified gold, that was a real plus for the studio and myself. So I have nothing but good memories of the session.

Credit: July 23, 1983, issue of Billboard. Scan by World Radio History.

* Special thanks to Andreas Wostrack of the exhaustive Joe Jackson Archive, who provided me with rare Joe Jackson articles, as well as an impossible-to-find 2009 mastering of Night and Day.

** The main DAC used was a Berkeley Audio Reference Series Alpha DAC with the most recent firmware. I also used the Matrix Sabre Pro. For speaker listening, amplification came from a Bryston 4B Cubed power amplifier and a Benchmark HPA4 preamp/headphone amplifier, which drove KEF Reference 1 speakers with an SVS SB-13 Ultra subwoofer. Headphone listening was done with the Matrix DAC and the Flux FA-10 amp in front of Focal Utopia and ZMF Atrium headphones. I also listened on several IEMs, such as the ThieAudio Monarch MKII and Moondrop Kato.

About the Author

Josh Mound has been an audiophile since age 14, when his father played Spirit's "Natures Way" through his Boston Acoustics floorstanders and told Josh to listen closely. Since then, Josh has listened to lots of music, owned lots of gear, and done lots of book learnin'. He's written about music for publications like Filter and Under the Radar and about politics for publications like New Republic, Jacobin, and Dissent. Josh is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on modern U.S. politics and the history of popular music. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.