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.
The closest Becker ever got to Prince. Specifically the Linn drum funk era, and I mean that as a compliment. Sounds less like a demo and more like a full song with the way the drum machine pounds