Top 35 Walter Becker Quotes

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.

I love guys like Charlie Parker.

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.

‘8 Miles to Pancake Day‘ is a reconciliation of the classic space-time dilemma.

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.

We try to write things that work on a variety of levels at the same time: A sleek exterior with a turbulent lyric.

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.

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.

Most of our songs are about relationships.

If any artist abuses his audience as a means to any end, noble or ignoble, he better have a damn good reason for it.

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.

In the ’70s… there were rock players, and there were jazz players.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Our career had a sort of funny shape.

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.

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.

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.

ABC had all these schlocky, bubblegum acts, and we had to come up with suitable material for them. In which we were amazingly unsuccessful.

I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.

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.

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.

You have a kid, and it’s like, ‘He’s gotta go to college! Gotta have some clothes!’

It’s great fun to play with a really good band.

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 spent a couple of years not doing any music or anything, just here in Hawaii trying to get healthy and adjust to the new regimen I was setting up for myself.

People are really exercised about one particular thing, and that is themselves. They will bore you endlessly with their broken hearts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.