Playing At Songwriting With Walter Becker
“The ability to play is one of the principle criteria of mental health” -Ashley Montagu
We were well into a second bottle, sitting in my kitchen in Venice, and spending just about the same amount of time laughing as we were spending writing. We would be throwing a line back and forth, coming across what might have been an adequate solution for a rhyme or line, then tossing it out. When we’d hit something that was beyond what was just “good enough” often Walter would yell “Ouchy!” or I would yell “Yes!!!” We already had a first verse that got us into motion. More red wine, then we’d be on to the next scene in the story. We needed a chorus that stuck….Somehow we both knew bits and pieces of a Samuel Johnson poem, and we started playing around with it… the line from the Johnson poem was “Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate”…..What if we just took “darkling down”, and made “Darkling” a name in the plot, and “Down” as the state that he had descended into? We bounced around with the idea some:
“Darkling down on a darkling plain…” “Ouchy!” that felt good. A sad, urban loser, who, alas, thought that he was a winner…. We played around some more:
“Darkling down on a darkling plain
in the dim dank night of the pissin’ down rain (“Ouchy!”)
Darkling down on the balls of his ass (a particularly coarse expression that we dug up in conversation to describe a “frenemy” from somewhere)
While he prays and waits….. for the storm to pass” (Yess!!!!)
Where would we go for the next verse now? We had to place the story somewhere, and it had to be a sad little nowhere joint somewhere….
“Lemme show you where the good thing happens
It’s a barbershop in Inglewood”….. okay…so what happens there?
“Too bad we won’t get past the bouncer…
Sadly I’ve been banned for good..” (Yes!!)
This is what I call FUN! A lot of the time songwriting is just hard, and kind of lonely, even with a collaborator, but when I would sit writing with Walter, and we would bounce ideas back and forth on music or words, the process was so braided together with laughter and shared shadenfreude, that it was just about the best fun that I’ve ever had making something. As soon as it got hard, we would just naturally lapse into conversation, telling each other some kind of macabre story of one ill-fated romantic misadventure or another. It never, ever seemed like work. For me it was like playing tennis with Rod Laver or Pete Sampras. Walter was so damn quick, and so damn smart… I always felt like I was both making something together, and desperately trying to keep up with his mind. For me, this is the best dynamic there is… trying to keep up with someone who is better than I am. It feels like an ecstatic state of a sort. The adrenaline is flowing, but you’re not in a state of panic…. you’re just playing with someone who is a fair bit better (hey, that’s a nice bit of alliteration!). than you are.
So we moved forward… we had to continue to build the sad little narrative of this loser-winner…
“Well, there’s a coffee shop right’ round the corner
The proprieter knows my name (who hasn’t reveled in that small bit of fame when they went to their favorite joint?)
Cup o’ Joe and a Vicks inhaler
Now you’re ready for the big-boy game”
Okay…. so now our boy is on a cheap high in addition to his misguided sense of superiority…
“Steady son, come seven come eleven
If either one of us can count that high (“Ouchy”!)
Muscatel if the deal gets dicey
Milk and honey in the by and by”
Now we’re talking! At this point in a song that I’d be working with W on, I’d be feeling like we were in the updraft of the groove. We’d be able to start building forward by referring back to material that we had established to construct the rest of the narrative. If I would get stuck sitting in a somnambulistic trance, trying to find a rhyme, he would already be two squares ahead, and pull me out.
“Let’s go back to an altered chorus”:
“Darkling down, it’s a damn disgrace
Going round and round in a very small place
Darkling down with a hole in his soul
That he can’t explain and he can’t control”
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I met Walter Becker at the Grammys in 2001. Steely Dan had just won Album Of The Year for their album Two Against Nature. I vividly remember the moment when they won, as I had gone to the ceremony with Joni, and we both spontaneously stood up together to give them a standing ovation, but we were surrounded with artists and managers who were not very happy about them winning. Their victory was a complete longshot, as they were up against albums that had sold exponentially more than the great album that they had made. I don’t remember the specifics of our dialog after the ceremony; I just remember the feeling of having found a big brother soul who had a kindred aesthetic.
Through the years after that we would talk on the phone almost every day, and I would get together with him along with his wife Delia whenever they were in Los Angeles or I was in New York. I was going through, as usual, some kind of existential crisis, and they were exceedingly kind and generous, as well as just providing inspired and like-minded company.
Then at a certain point, perhaps in 2006, he proposed the idea of writing a second solo album of his together, that I would produce. Of course, I was overjoyed and excited by the idea. The album title would end up being “Circus Money” which was the title of a song that he had already written.
Through the next year and a half or so we would alternate writing jags in Manhattan, Los Angeles and Maui, where he and Delia had a place, and Walter had a studio. Each jag would be about a week long, and be assisted by the presence of large quantities of wine and other pharmaceutical elements. For the most part we would do the demos on his laptop with a prehistoric digital software that only he was still fluent on called Vision. We would purposely leave the demos in a very rough and skeletal state; sketching out melodies with a vibraphone sound. All of our writing sessions would seamlessly float in and out of general philosophical wanderings, and elaborate comedy, utilizing a group of verbal characters that we developed, into more focused songwriting once day turned to night.
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We needed a bridge. We drifted into the conclusion that we needed our protagonist to display a drastically exaggerated and inflated ego:
“For the fun or for the money
For the fuck of it or just because
Listen friend, this is no damn picnic
But let’s imagine for a minute that it was” (Woohoo!)
Then the idea to persist, and to just keep piling up the misguided self-aggrandizement:
“Who will feast on this buzzard’s banquet?
Who will render my heroic bust?
Who will choke on my lachrymose (good scrabble word!) musings?
Who will eat my zero dust “(particularly satisfying somehow…)
Who will wear this puke-streaked tunic? (probably pain-killer induced line, in retrospect, but good for a laugh)
Who shall gorge on this cup of spleen
Who will sing about the good, bad, and ugly?
And all and everything in between?”
Then back to various permutations of our character’s manic self-description:
“Darkling down, this is God’s good man
On his hands and knees, livin’ God’s good plan
Darkling down and we don’t know still (a bit of Yoda-speak)
When he’ll come around if he ever will”
And a little concluding flourish for our man, as he careens forth:
“Darkling down on a zero-G dive
And we just can’t say will the fool survive
Darkling down in a seven-G turn
Glowing like a coal in the after burn”
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I think that, though the group of songs that we ended up writing was composed of a pretty good balance of earnest (or as earnest as was possible for us) self-reflection, abstract fantasy, and alcohol and pharmaceutically-assisted humor, the songs that were centered around reprehensible and unlikeable characters were the most fun to write. We both had a distinct fondness for Philip K. Dick’s books, and an aversion to overt sentimentality. There were some that Walter had the germs of prior to us going at them. We mined various sources for inspiration. He led me on a research mission through obscure 70’s reggae, with many visits to a great reggae record store in Manhattan, to build the musical backbone with. He gave me the complete “Arabian Nights Entertainments”, and neither of us could leave a book store without 8 books. We had both come through relationships that were replete with self-evident and fatal traps, and for me The Single Man’s Life in L.A. was filled with endless black comedy. The playful process was always as beneficial for me as the end result. There was a purpose, but without serious or direct intent. I can still hear his laughter. He sure had a great laugh…
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