Top 77 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Becker
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Walter Becker.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
People are really exercised about one particular thing, and that is themselves. They will bore you endlessly with their broken hearts.
I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas.
There was a film called 'FM,' and we were asked to do the title song. And I said, 'Does it have to have any specific words?' And they said, 'No, it just has to be about FM radio.' It took a day or two to write.
I think what television and video games do is reminiscent of drug addiction. There's a measure of reinforcement and a behavioural loop.
We have been fortunate enough to do something that has always been out of the mainstream and yet have an audience for what we do.
All our wives are experimental psychologists.
I think the audience for Limp Bizkit is probably not going to be particularly interested in what we're doing. I don't think they'll find much that satisfies them in what we do.
'Deacon Blues' was special for me. It's the only time I remember mixing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feeling like I wanted to hear it over and over again. It was the comprehensive sound of the thing: the song itself, its character, the way the instruments sounded, and the way Tom Scott's tight horn arrangement fit in.
Some places you play in America, it's like 'On the Waterfront.'
If you're playing in a room that holds 15,000 people, it's just a question of how bad the room acoustics are and in what way they're bad.
We opened for the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Guess Who, Chuck Berry, Sha Na Na. We opened for Cheech and Chong - I opened for Cheech, and Don opened for Chong.
My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.
In the '70s... there were rock players, and there were jazz players.
We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.
Let's face it, us '60s folks had pretty high expectations.
I always look for the weirdest note to land on. I felt that that was the least I could do for the great musical traditions which I've spawned.
What gets people into trouble with records now is that they want to build something up without substantial musical ideas. Without that as a foundation, you can add all the layers of sound you want - it's still going to sound like a mess.
Given a choice between Charlie Mingus and Eric Dolphy or Joe Strummer and Lou Reed, there was no choice. I like Reed and Strummer, but it's kiddie music.
I guess actually playing on the records and touring is a great forced practice regimen for me. And you learn a lot playing with people.
You have a kid, and it's like, 'He's gotta go to college! Gotta have some clothes!'
With any relationship that goes on and is productive over a long period, there have to be some sort of interlocking qualities in those personalities that make it possible to survive.
I don't think that the Grammys are in any way a just way of grading music.
I'm a self-taught musician aside from what I've been able to pick up from other players.
It was the 'Gaucho' album that finished us off. We had pursued an idea beyond the point where it was practical. That album took about two years, and we were working on it all of that time - all these endless tracking sessions involving different musicians. It took forever, and it was a very painful process.
I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.
What about that Dave Brubeck live album, with a version of 'Like Someone in Love' on it, and long sax solos by Paul Desmond? That's what got me hooked on jazz.
'Gaucho' was a struggle for us for a lot of reasons, and in the end, we just sort of survived it.
From a linguistic point of view, you can't really take much objection to the notion that a show is a show is a show.
That's sort of what we wanted to do: conquer from the margins, sort of find our place in the middle based on the fact that we were creatures of the margin and of alienation.
The more of what our music does violates the premise of its format that it's presented in, the better. So, hearing our music in the supermarket, a Muzak version, is great.
If there's a strange way to do something, I would certainly like to know about it. I feel that I owe that to my public.
It's interesting how some songs really lend themselves to performance in a big public venue and performance by a band and so on, and so they're even more successful in that context than they were on the record.
I love guys like Charlie Parker.
Singing, for me, means singing as loud as I can.
Most of the time when people say something sounds like Steely Dan, and I listen to it, it doesn't. And I'm not even sure what they're talking about.
It's a mystery to me why everybody doesn't love jazz. I've never been able to figure that out.
If any artist abuses his audience as a means to any end, noble or ignoble, he better have a damn good reason for it.
It's great fun to play with a really good band.
We try to write things that work on a variety of levels at the same time: A sleek exterior with a turbulent lyric.
I thought Twitter was a joke. I really thought it was a gag. I thought it was like National Lampoon or the Onion.
I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.
It's good - it's great when somebody who is 20 years younger than you comes up and says, 'Wow, we just got turned on to you guys, and you're really great,' or something like that. I like that.
Originally, we had a band known as Steely Dan. As we moved away from the band, we got whoever was appropriate for specific tunes. In a lot of cases, we gravitated toward jazz players who had more sophisticated harmonic concepts.
I have a feeling there were many, many successful rock duos that just didn't get attention. That's the fault of the rock press. They are always playing up controversy, scandal, aggravation, and irritation.
When you start to work with someone, there's a negotiation that takes place involving what's going to happen when you have a difference of opinion. Most attempts at collaboration never survive the negotiation. Merely being agreeable is not enough.
The protagonist in 'Deacon Blues' is a triple-L loser - an L-L-L Loser. It's not so much about a guy who achieves his dream but about a broken dream of a broken man living a broken life.
We are constantly competing with the monsters from the id.
We fly to the town in the little private airplane, and then we have to get in cars and drive to the hotel and then drive to the gig. So, I want to do a tour where the performances will actually be at the small airports.
I think every time, before we do an album, we have a discussion where we sort of consider the idea of doing something radically different.
Cynicism, I contend, is the wailing of someone who believes that things are, or should be, or could be, much, much better than they are.
I think that there's the self-imposed pressure to come up with something that's good. For guys like us, that's much more important than any external pressure could really be.
I'm glad we turned into a big-time touring band later in life. In fact, it's almost like we planned it out that way.
Rock music is being systematically merged with fashion.
I learned a lot from the various artists I produced. Either you see them doing something that you do want to do it, or you see them doing something the way you don't want to do it.
We've been allowed to operate unmolested on the fringes of the music scene, really. That's where we enjoy it most.
'8 Miles to Pancake Day' is a reconciliation of the classic space-time dilemma.
It seemed like the more complex the music we were playing, the less able we were to guarantee its consistency.
I'm not interested in a rock/jazz fusion.
There are some things that I write that I know are personal in a way, or the gag is so obscure that it's just for me, and there's other things that could basically be for anybody or be anything, at least until the lyrics start to get written.
You can't always count on the devices, attitudes, and conceits that stood you in good stead in 1972 or 1973, or 1978-79, to still have the same impact all these years later.
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