1997
He Wants You (Out)
words & music
Walter Becker (1997)
© Zeon Music LLC 2018
Well we all ride together in this world
Fall together where we stand
And we all got one slim chance to be heard
It's all written in the plan
This is all I ask of you
Tell me sweetness tell me true
From that very first soul kiss
You knew it would be like this
We all ride together in this world
Well didn't we just girl
He reads you — he reads you loud and clear
He wants you — he wants you out of here
He needs you — you and what army dear
He wants you — he wants you out of here
Well we all need protection from the pain
For protection we will pay
And we all seek the shelter from the rain
Here comes that rainy day
It won't make it real again
Not all the horses all the men
It won't do you any good
Not all the pills in Hollywood
We all need protection now and then
Here it is again
He loves you —he loves your story dear
He wants you — he wants you out of here
He sees you — he sees you disappear
He wants you — he wants you out of here
Well we all ride together in this world
Wait forever on the curb
And we all ask for much more than we need
And we get what we deserve
He hears you — he's seeming not to hear
He wants you — he wants you out of here
He's got you — he's had you up to here
He wants you — he wants you out of here
He needs you — you and what army dear
He wants you — he wants you out of here
He reads you — he reads you loud and clear
He wants you — he wants you out of here
Another one of Becker's infamous "Love Songs"!
Anyone woman at all familiar with his Whack work and demos would think long and hard before sweetly trilling "write me a love song, dahling!" -- knowing she was as likely to get one of these than an Almost Gothic or a Paging Audrey. That musical bouquet of his was always as likely to conceal a shiv than sweet-nothings.
This tune was one of three demos Walter sent me on a DAT in late 1997 (ever-thoughtful, he bundled it with a portable "Walkman"-type DAT player. Sort of like Voyager. I was impressed). I asked him: "so these are rejects from Whack?" to which he replied nah, just a few things he'd been working on lately. By this time he was deep into writing for Two Against Nature with Fagen, so it took me a couple of beats to realize that after his Whack work, he and his Opcode had apparently just kept on trucking along.
He must have liked this one, must have been keeping it on his "potentially active" list, since he was still occasionally listening to it few years later...
...as he was one afternoon in late '99 ....
PS: His vocals on these three '97 demos were uncommonly lackluster, to put it kindly. One of them, in fact -- a tune called The Love You Ax -- will remain forever sealed, falling into the rare category of the demo vocal he would never allow out of the box. It's a nice tune though; perhaps one day 'll post an instrumental of its solo and outro, for a sense of its feel. I just have to guess first if that would make more of you pissed or pleased.
Whoa! The synth bass on this demo is SUPER funky. Love it! I can't really say I find the vocals are "uncommonly lackluster" on this track, Walter sounds in fine voice to me, and it finds the vibe of the song and the lyrics really well. This one is definitely near the top of my list of these demos and unreleased songs, very cool tune. BTW neat the see the "And we all ask for much more than we need / And we get what we deserve" bit show up here as a bit of a precursor to the "I'm leaving with all I need, but less than I deserve" line on Downtown Canon.
yes Dan, interesting those 2 lines, here and n "DC"...especially since they seem to present polar opposite -- well maybe not polar opposite, but certainly "adjusted' -- philosophies :-)
Perfect day for a WB update. In morning traffic, listening to one of the Philosophize This podcasts it popped into my head that today I should finally determine if "susponed" is a word (well of course it is a "word"). Later in the day, focus squirming away from compensated tasks, I think, boy, Greg (tonefreak guitarist friend) really should be made aware of Adam Rogers' sound on Surf... Better listen to it right now to make sure... then I remember the morning's dictionary question, and that I'm in around the same song for entirely independent reasons. Then the Demo from '97 email drops in, and as I write this the bass clarinet flourish from Girlfriend is going by (uncredited? Sheppard? anyway a gem). My new Bose 'phones are aural telescopes in to galaxies of sound and tone, can I just say that Perowsky/Ephron on Surf are the absolute, er, _stuff_?! Anyway, somewhere during all this just needed to hear the Down in the Bottom solo and the spoken vocal cue-out, and it's safe to say I'm feeling pretty Walterish today. Now I'll listen to the demos; thanks for that.
feeling Walterish today....sigh. No other kinda day for me anymore it seems. Thanks for the company....
Really digging this one! It sounds like it's kind of from the same musical family as Sanpaku and maybe a couple of others from this time period, but just unique enough to make it interesting... as usual. Some of the sounds are so fascinating; almost thought there was about to be a bagpipes solo there in the middle, when he hung on that one note for a while! Now that would have been different. Lots more to dig into, as always with his stuff, but on first listen I'm already in a great mood. Thanks D! Appreciated the quick add to the Downloads section too...
Downloads is Matt's thing. Thanks Matt!!
Great tune. Just nails it for me. Great bass line and sound: funky and yet plodding, stalking, monster-like (is it "he"?). And the lyrics, somehow comforting, spelling out pain, ambiguity, rejection and togetherness. It's all quite relentless and wonderful. Love it! Not a lackluster performance vocally at all, it's his delivery that rounds out the tune, playing the friend clueing you in to the truth. Thank you for posting it.
Thanks Gracie! I'm very gratified so many people seem to like this one...I like it too...and as we've seen, he heard some potential in it as well. How interesting you find the lyrics...comforting? To him. Her? us? Well, personally, I always adored when he showed that shiv. Everybody's little Teddy Bear ---good ol cheerful Uncle Walt --- HA! they had no idea!!
(And very few people were graciously grateful for his "truth", as you imagine they might be :-) )
To you and all: As far as weak singing goes, please note that you are hearing this tune, which sounds fine...it's one of the other three that's over the "lackluster" line into something else "-)
Hey D and Matt, I noticed the FLAC and MP3 versions on the download page have the audio turned up too high and it's clipping making it sound distorted. The YouTube version doesn't have that problem and sounds fine. Here's a comparison screenshot where you can see the waveform getting clipped on the FLAC version but not on the Youtube version.
Thanks Dan - I may have sent Matt the "wrong" version....although I always correct for clipping and volume ((n Audacity or something) and send the cleanest version (.wav). Matt, any ideas?
@Moderator: D-Mod Hmmm...lemme look and see what's going on.
@Matthew Kerns Matt - I noticed something similar with the song 'Much Has Been Done...' The download version contains a lot of hiss and the music/vocals are very low in the mix, whereas the version via the mobile users link on the Rarities & Unreleased page sounds great!
Otherwise, thanks for all you do and the "little sly graphics" as D-Mod mentions below are always top-notch!
By the way...I love Matt's little sly graphics he uses on the downloads page. Gotta get that boy to come out and do more of this creative thing HERE! Doesn't everybody agree?!
Yes, I totally agree. Love 'em!
@hourstuff I hasten to add, though, that the majority of movies and slideshows that have appeared with our clips have been Matt's.
This one came up in my shuffle today, and I was thinking about the contradiction inherent in the chorus:
He wants you - he wants you out of here. He's got you - he's had you up to here. It reminded me of the old "Furry Years" track Undecided, with it's chorus: "I love you - Go away I hate you - No please stay" I was thinking of Walter's "context thesaurus" that d-mod has mentioned, and how in the clips that were shared on walterbecker.com he was revisiting songs like Jones. Clearly those old songs were fodder for reimagining, rewriting, reinterpreting, whatever. In this case it seems vague and ethereal, just the inclusion of a set of contradictions in the chorus section to make us question the verse narrative, but it was another a-ha moment for me about the way in which Walter's gifts as a songwriter were expressed. I see it pop up elsewhere in specific phrases "on the cellular level in case we have to call someone" in Our Lawn and later in Darkling Down. I suppose there were just phrases ideas and structures that didn't let go until they'd found proper expression in some song or another. I would further assume that this phenomenon, while easy to see and point out in lyrics, exists in chord changes and song structure and melody and harmony as well, though it would take a much more attuned ear than mine to point it out. Call it economy of ideas or call it genius—and I believe it to be a bit of both—but it is another interesting facet in understanding what makes a song or a songwriter great.
Lyrics, definitely — I mean, we saw “skating backwards at the speed of light” in an early 90’s notebook…and many others.
But musically, I don’t know. It may simply be that his melodies and progressions were such strange geese... most of them simply unique. I think if there were echos as obvious as those we find in lyric phrases, we’d hear them.
@Moderator: D-Mod
Skating Backward: I think what we have here is not harmonic but rather rhythmic lyric synergy of which the Two were masters. Let's look at some examples of what this could mean.
As a baseline consider I Think I Love You (Partridge Family). While admittedly a huge hit, the clownish lyric phrasing of the chorus made us snicker even in its day. Move up from near zero to the effective heights of Satisfaction (Rolling Stones); the guitar intro is the signature riff but the actual hook is the contrasting lyric phrasing of the main line, in the verse the emphasis is on "can't" and "no" while the chorus is "I" and "get". Higher still, run some of Got To Get You Into My Life (Beatles); the lyric rhythm of verse, pre-chorus and chorus shout all dazzle. In this rare air we find for example Black Cow (Steely Dan). Run any of this in your mind, verse or chorus, and you can't without knitting it onto those rhythmic bones, climaxing in Big Black Cow! To the reference, Jack of Speed... the first half of a verse sits on but one harmonic center, but oh boy that phrasing... now there's a Case In Point!
(I'm probably not tracking the discussion very well here, but wanted anyway to express this idea to a sympathetic crowd)
@rob hewett I think I scan up to the jump to JOS; you seem to be pointing out how the complexity of a melody within a single chord or chordal phrase ranges from simplistic to complex and that further, within that is the rhythmic complexity ... and that all other things being equal, SD and WB when compared to other artists can be counted on to land in the complex territory ...have I got that about right? I would certainly agree with that.
And I've long thought that the most envelope-stretching, mind-blowing possibilities of that variety will be found in just about any Joni Mitchell song; she applies completely novel meters and rhythms (and indeed, complexities) on the A sections, B sections etc of her songs to where there's really no scheme at all; whatever words she wants to use in the lyrics of this particular verse, every other variable -- how many notes and therefore the melody; the rhythm, the emphases -- will be subservient to them. Sometimes the B section will be three long notes, the next B section will be as crowded as a verse of "'Reelin'". I've always been amazed at how we manage to come away from listening to her songs feeling that we've heard a song at all -- in other words, amazed that a unified sense of a song still manages to emerge from such an otherwise ad lib sounding collection of phrases.
Interesting comment, thank you, and part of it clarified something for me - it's not really a contradiction when "you" are the object of love or hate by the other in a (admittedly dysfunctional) relationship, because either way "you" and "he" are circling like binary stars....it's a win to some!