Steely Dan Quotes
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It wouldn't bother me at all not to play on my own album.
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I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn’t quite happen. I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see.
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What a beautiful world this will be What a glorious time to be free
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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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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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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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What do you do with what you're given, and how do you transform it into something worthwhile?
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Now why the hell would I want to increase the volume of my ejaculation ? They can already hear me in the apartment next door.
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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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It seemed like the more complex the music we were playing, the less able we were to guarantee its consistency.
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When you get a groove going, time flies.
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Our career had a sort of funny shape.
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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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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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Rock music is being systematically merged with fashion.
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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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Going out and looking for managers is like going out and looking for rattlesnakes.
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I think what television and video games do is reminiscent of drug addiction. There's a measure of reinforcement and a behavioural loop.
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As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.
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I don't particularly like L.A.
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All our wives are experimental psychologists.
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In the '70s... there were rock players, and there were jazz players.
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Melodies can be good depending on the context. You can have a simple melody, and if the harmony behind it is interesting, it can make a very simple melody really different. You can also have a complex melody. The more complex it is, the harder it is to sing, and then sometimes it can sound contrived. You could write a melody that would be fine on a saxophone but if you give it to a singer, it can sound raunchy.
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Most of our songs are about relationships.