ALBUM OF THE MONTH

Since we have a bit of extra room here why not add links to the two short clips posted on YouTube by Scapegrace99 (Walter himself?) ahead of the album:

How about filming a video respone and upload it?

Album #76 is Circus Money by Walter Becker.

Fourteen years after his solo debut Walter Becker released his second album. The first one without any sight of Steely Dan companion Donald Fagen in the studio playing, producing or writing.

Instead Walter has been collaborating with Larry Klein, who co-wrote all songs but one and also produced the record.

The musicians are basically the people who have been part of Steely Dan in the studio and on tour during the 2000's. They're also featured on Donald Fagen's 2006 solo album Morph The Cat.

Walter himself handles all the lead vocals as well as playing bass, a decision that had direct bearing on the album’s point of origin. “The bass gave me a more powerful position to define the direction I wanted the music to take,” he explains.

“As much as anything, that direction had to do with the fact that, for years before I started this project, I was listening almost exclusively to Jamaican music. I even became something of an expert on various sub genres, such as songs about motorcycles and/or featuring motorcycle sound effects; songs about the barbers versus the dreads, and songs about various judicial procedures. I initially had the idea of writing lyrics directly to some of the dub instrumental tracks I was hearing, but, as I got further into the process with Larry we instead used reggae as a sort of stepping-off point. You can hear it, especially in the rhythm section, throughout the album, which is one of the reasons I wanted to be back there working with the drummers.”

So the album is more rhythm than melody. And here's what Walter has to say about the individual tracks:

Door Number Two
It’s the only song I’ve ever written with a title that came to me in a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night and asked my wife, ‘Can you tell me what’s behind door number two?’ I don’t remember the story up to that point.

Downtown Canon
When I was a kid, I used to work summers at my father’s office on Canal Street. We made a lot of deliveries to Soho, where artists were just beginning to move into lofts. Later, in college, when I meet someone with a loft I’d think to myself, ‘Just wait until I get one of those.’

Bob Is Not Your Uncle Any More
It’s just another bitter reproach-slash-love song.

Upside Looking Down
It’s an older song that had been hanging around for a while and after I showed it to Larry, we spruced it up. I think it came out sounding a little like a Brill Building tune, something that might have come from Leiber & Stoller or Bert Berns.

Paging Audrey
I usually don’t traffic in sincerity. I always feel like I’m on someone else’s territory, but it seemed appropriate on this occasion.

Circus Money
Not long ago I dropped off a friend of mine and his two kids at the Big Apple Circus in Manhattan. That prompted me to start thinking of the circus as a metaphor and it captured my imagination.

Selfish Gene
This is a play on the quasi-scientific concept that a particular member of a species may, at times, act in a way that is not in its interest but benefits the species in general. An example may be a male spider that mates with a female and then is eaten by her. We just transferred it to Brentwood.

Do You Remember The Name
The summer we were writing these songs I was doing a lot of flying between coasts and I would often find myself seated next to German businessmen who were traveling on round-the-world tickets. One of them in particular seemed a little less German than East German, if you know what I mean, with a Socialist Realism suit and voice that was a little too loud. Our friendship began when he had trouble opening a bag of airline peanuts. He dropped a lot of famous names, people he had known, like Vladimir Horowitz and Igor Stravinsky, and always added ‘Do you remember the name?’ as a kind of rhetorical flourish. I later found the phrase in a poem by Goethe. I think it must be a sort of Germanic idiom.

Somebody’s Saturday Night
Think of it as a dating song.

Darkling Down
This song is about someone who is on a bad run and it’s been going on for so long that it’s usurped any legitimate sense of identity. They see themselves only in terms of this exhilarating race to the bottom.

God’s Eye View
My wife is an experimental psychologist and this is a term that is used to describe something that you could know if you knew everything. But of course, you don’t.

Three Picture Deal
For some reason, both my solo albums and the ones with Steely Dan are either about New York or Los Angeles. This one turned out to be more about LA, although New York is also represented.

Dark Horse Dub’
No comments in the oficial press-release on this exclusive bonus track only available on the international release of the album. You have to ask Walter about it yourself next time you meet him.

N.S. - July 2008.