Steely Dan Quotes
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With 'Aja,' there was a sort of happy conjunction between our tastes and the backgrounds and styles of studio musicians at the time.
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Randy Newman seemed like an even worse singer than me. I liked Ray Charles, Levi Stubbs, Jack Jones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett.
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I think of Steely Dan as being of its time, and it may be inseparable from its time.
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It's great to know that our old stuff still sounds good to our fans, just as it's wonderful to think that we've turned a few people on to jazz over the years.
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My style is a little quirky. I can't play as fast as most professional jazz players.
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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.
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We're not getting any younger.
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I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically.
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ABC had all these schlocky, bubblegum acts, and we had to come up with suitable material for them. In which we were amazingly unsuccessful.
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I'm not interested in a rock/jazz fusion.
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People are usually afraid to say what's on their mind.
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I don't think you can escape the environment we live in now.
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We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK.
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People are really exercised about one particular thing, and that is themselves. They will bore you endlessly with their broken hearts.
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I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.
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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.
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Some places you play in America, it's like 'On the Waterfront.'
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If it feels like we're re-creating something rather than creating something, we don't do it.
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You have a kid, and it's like, 'He's gotta go to college! Gotta have some clothes!'
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Popularity has everything to do with business and nothing to do with music.