Walter Becker Quotes
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It wouldn't bother me at all not to play on my own album.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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It seemed like the more complex the music we were playing, the less able we were to guarantee its consistency.
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Our career had a sort of funny shape.
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I'm a self-taught musician aside from what I've been able to pick up from other players.
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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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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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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 don't particularly like L.A.
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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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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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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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We are constantly competing with the monsters from the id.
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Singing, for me, means singing as loud as I can.
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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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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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Going out and looking for managers is like going out and looking for rattlesnakes.
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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.