Walter Becker Quotes
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The perfect day for me is waking up and having a cup of tea with my kids before I drive them to school; Then, I go into the studio and try and write some music for three or four hours and give up about noon.
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It wouldn't bother me at all not to play on my own album.
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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.
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When you're collaborating with somebody, there has to be a spirit of cooperation. There are a lot of times when you just can't persuade someone to write a certain type of song, either musically or lyrically.
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I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas.
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It's a mystery to me why everybody doesn't love jazz. I've never been able to figure that out.
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Most of our songs are about relationships.
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It seemed like the more complex the music we were playing, the less able we were to guarantee its consistency.
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I thought Twitter was a joke. I really thought it was a gag. I thought it was like National Lampoon or the Onion.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.
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'Gaucho' was a struggle for us for a lot of reasons, and in the end, we just sort of survived it.
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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.
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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.
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We are constantly competing with the monsters from the id.
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When the first album came out and I heard 'Do It Again' on the radio, that was the greatest thing that had ever happened. After that, it was all downhill.
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In the '70s... there were rock players, and there were jazz players.
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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.
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In the '70s, my playing was completely untutored, but it sounded good to me, and I tried to find ways to make those very simple things work in more ambitious contexts.
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I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.
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It's great fun to play with a really good band.