movie: matt kerns
My time on Maui impressed me with its relative lack of seasons. Sure, there was a hot season, dog days when the trade winds died, a rainy season... but to a North Easterner like me, such low variation made it easy to lose the sense of time passing. Birthdays were less a discreet bead on an abacus (or a salty pearl) than, well, .... just a little more time passing. I wrote this "birthday haiku" for Walter one year:
“Just one season here!” -
- tossing back to the water
forty-six salt pearls
Apparently taken by one of the phrases, he repeated it a few times under his breath :
just one season here...interesting...
And what creative, personalized gift would I like for my birthday? We were trying to stop gift-giving entirely so I picked a guaranteed impossibility: write me a song! We both had a good laugh; you just don't give commissions to Walter Becker. I laughed and laughed...
...until some years later, when on one birthday I was presented with a CD, gold bow on top. It's a little late , he said. It was "my" commission. Well knock me over with a guitar pick.
It was a truly precious gift of course, and somehow -- was it the "waltz with a push" maybe? -- a different type of song from his usual. It also typified something you learn spending time with a creative person: for them, the transformation of meaning is endless and effortless: any concept or phrase encountered in one context could and would be transfigured, almost automatically, to several others entirely. When he was repeating the phrase just one season , I reasonably thought he was repeating the words along with their "original" context: the timeless feel of a place without seasons.
Ha. In that moment he was likely running the phrase through some kind of " context thesaurus" where the phrase takes on other meanings...in this case, the tiresome predictabilty of various interpersonal dramas. I came to think of this as a type of untethered, superflexible three-dimensional engagement with language that "regular" Folk just didn't naturally have without trying for it. His song typifies this notion..
I told him many times it was really good, he really should release it on his website. To this he invariably shrugged... but in that way that meant I wouldn't protest too much if it happened to slip itself online.
Today, though, I hoard his gifts. I once urged him to share it with everyone; now , I don't want to share it with anyone.
But I know how good it is, and how distinctive ...and I believe he did too. Now that I feel among friends here at at wbmedia, friends who hold WB's talent in esteem and his memory with affection, I'm happy to present you, fellow WB freaks, the World Premiere of Walter Becker's Only One Season
ONLY ONE SEASON Walter Becker
© Zeon LLC 2017
The old friends and the family
Rumbling in the alley
Somehow you don’t care anymore
The guts and the glory
The old hard luck story
Heard it all before
The bad breaks and the heartaches
You give ‘em , you get ‘em
Make all the same mistakes
That’s cool, you let ‘em
No use trying to please them dear
There’s only one season here
You cut loose of the whole deal
You jump on in your bad wheels
There’s just not a whole lot more to know
You drop down into first gear
You start out from right here
And point it where you want to go
The rain falls and the wind blows,
That’s how they rig it
It’s all part of the floor show
Sit back and dig it
You don’t need a reason dear
Only one season here
Now we all had some good fun
But this one here’s a re-run
Generally it’s more sad than true
The bad guys and the black hats
We’ve been there and done that,
Now I’m gonna do something new
The good luck and the big bucks
You get ‘em when you need ‘em
It’s up there in the headlines
It ain’t hard to read ‘em
Ringing out loud and clear
Just the one season here
Ringing out loud and clear
Just the one season here
No use trying to please them dear
Just the one season here.
Vocals & Opcode: Walter Becker
Vocal recording and engineering: Dave Russell .
Here I am, sitting around at 3am when I get an email from the WB website. Weird on all accounts, had to check it out.
Glad I opened it and found this song, and this new site.
Thanks for sharing, it means a lot.
Great to hear Walter's voice again.
Wow! What a compliment D-Mod! That’s truly one of a kind and a great tune. Thank you for sharing something so personal with us.
Schweeeeet!! What more can one say?! This is great. Thank you so much for sharing this very personal and wonderful tune with the world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!
I love everything about this, the story, the poem, the song, the lyrics, and the idea of a "context thesaurus." (Where can I get one of those?)
Thanks for sharing mod. Amazing stuff. The song is pretty good too. :-)
Thanks for sharing this great music and the great personal sentiment that it came with! This place makes me feel like I understand the man, the nonpareil - Walter Becker - even better.
Downloads for Only One Season now online
I love the vibe of the tune, jazzy and smooth. It has a big touch of 'Nightfly', showing how likeminded Walter and Donald where. Thanks for sharing this very personal gift from Walter to you!
Beautiful and personal, thanks for releasing and sharing this!
Initially I felt kind of a 'Take 5' vibe, but of course it's very Walter.
It's also indicative of how a creative mind appreciates the islands.
Thanks very much for this, & for all the HTML-architecture around it. A beautiful song; a great, moving, & funny story. Am I wrong to think that that very quick initial drone-shot, those two chairs, that green lawn, might be somewhere on the coast near P___, on the north shore, where Sayan laid part of Walter to rest? If so, thanks for including it. It's a good view, something a gentleman avocado farmer would have rightfully been proud of.
cjbrayshaw: the chairs in the video are like a namecheck; the actual scene is this --at the edge of the lawn, there's a 15' drop to a rocky coast. Down some rock stairs and a few steps away is a little bay with enough sand to get into the water without getting all cut up. The picture was taken during low tide. Fantastic view with lots of action in the water (huge turtles--they all had the name Big Head Todd the Turtle God: wave-riding fish: tidepool denizens: spinner dolphins — and in season, farther out past the second break, momma humpbacks with new baby, slapping and breaching). We used to call it Channel 1. "Hey you want to watch Channel 1 for a while?".
Aw thanks DB. That view means a lot to me. My partner & I went to P___ in 2012 & poked around for a few days in between other, more casual island pursuits (swimming; walking; making art-photographs; meeting mongeese & wild chickens) & met some folks who, upon realizing we were a/ Canadian, and, b/ shy, and, c/ not demanding or otherwise intrusive on artists' personal privacy, kindly shared some memories & other details with us. The closest we ever got to Channel One was the H__'___a overlook at dusk before our Mama's reservation, the dull thump of breakers audible all the way up the cliff, a few brave surfers out there in the dark blue April water. It was totally worth the bumpy 5+ hours in the air to & from Vancouver. Thanks again for that view, & all that you do here.
a new favorite - this one has the goods, a few strong muscles sprung into lyric endoskeleton. the hook for me is from the high tradition of pantonal blues - at the IV of the verse the bass goes V, so the 2 of the chord and WB magic is made. Walking back down through the strange mode, back to one, pedal under a sweet melody and shimmering lyric "...only one season...". Is it major? minor? both? neither? exquisite!
Awseome, unbeleivably personal and just untouchable. Thx for sharing YOUR song
I knew it, I just knew it!! My Wife and I enjoyed our Honeymoon on Maui in 2002, we did only special things. Having no idea, thoughts, or concern for who lived there or where they might live while driving on that beautiful Highway, I was struck, blind out of nowhere, I looked to the side and I just knew it!! This is where he was, still don't know about that Karma or how things like that happen to minds, I JUST KNEW IT!!!! "HE" lived here. I'm geting chills.
Rob - thanks for your post. I myself am ignorant of the sort of music theory that would allow me to deconstruct a song like this -- I just know it has that Becker scale (pantonal you say?) and "sounds" like him -- even with all it's different features. I a;ways hoped that discussion about our posts would include music nerds :-) and others who could have fun pointing out things to the rest of us and talking amongst themselves ....so any other scale-sleuths out there please join in! And Rob, if you're part of another community that might enjoy this sort of thing, bring em on over! ...This sort of discussion is part of Walter's legacy as well, and I'd love for it to be part of our site.
To everyone else, your responses are lovely, and I thank you for your insight and delicacy. I was sort of a wreck the last couple of days...but now, I'm very glad I shared it.
perhaps "opticode" should be "opcode" (unless there's some additional obscure meaning). I didn't know opticode, but did see this https://www.soundonsound.com/people/walter-becker
See! That's just the crowd-source knowledge I hoped for! Right you are, Rob, thanks. I'm changing the credit now... btw, the article rob cites above is a good one for those interested in stages of Circus Money.
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