Psychotherapy of Neurotic Character would have been a good alternate name to the Citizen Steely Dan box set.

I’ve not had as much time as I would like to focus on all things WB. I signed on to write four podcast series, and that had taken quite a bit of my free time. I send the third one off Friday, and then I’ll research and write the other next month, and that should let me do another thing over here. I’ve been thinking about writing up something on Girlfriend and the permutations it took. Or something else.

The moment it launches into the chorus never fails to give me the chills.

The article in question is now online: https://www.historynet.com/texas-jack-omohundro-celebrity-cowboy/

I'm trying to remember by playing the imaginary piano on my desk, but I feel like I'm playing G in the bass with F Bb Eb on the right hand. That's the last chord in the sequence, right? Before it goes back to the main part?

I agree...it's so great that this one is finally out there in the public. I'm always psyched to hear a Becker/Fagen composition I haven't already assimilated, but I was equally impressed with her versions of the Furry Years tracks I already know and love. Roaring of the Lamb always gets me...you just have to love a song that start with "Quick some redhots cried the handsome fullback," rhymes it with bivouac, and gets more cryptic from there.

Yeah, I wasn't really sure what to call that. Over that Eb in the bass, I'm playing (A D G) with the right hand on the piano. One of those situations where the actual part isn't complex, but trying to name the thing is more complicated than playing it is.

Heya D, For this video, I decided to check out what all the fuss is/was about AI-generated imagery. Every image in this vid was generated by Mid Journey (www.midjourney.com), which takes a text prompt and turns it into art. It's a pretty amazing tool, with an immense amount of possibilities, which requires some finesse to turn into something approaching useful/useable art. If we look at just one of the images in this video (the one that corresponds to "So I’m waiting for mine on the methadone line / Yes I’ve come down to the end of my run."), we can get an idea for what the AI is doing. I started with the prompt "a lonely man waits in a line of people at a methodone clinic." From that phrase, the AI popped back these four images: Those are pretty good, but I wanted to try to give all of the images in the video a cohesive feel, and I also wanted to subject to be more "in" line than just at a methadone clinic, so I rephrased my prompt to "a man waits in line at a methadone clinic. gritty and moody." To narrow the stylistic choices the AI would return, I added to this (and to the other prompts I used in this video) the instructions "neo noir, blue ambiance, photorealistic render, ray tracing, extremely detailed, center composition, unreal engine 5, vfx, octane render, 8k," and I set an aspect ratio of 16:9 (sixteen parts wide by 9 high, as appears in the video). This time, the AI returned these four images: The bottom left one was closest to what was in my head, a guy waiting his turn at the counter in the methadone clinic, so I enlarged it and used it in the video. And so it went for the rest of the "scenes." Sometimes I got an immediate result that was exactly what I was looking for, and sometimes I had to change my phrasing to get the AI to understand what I wanted. It really makes you think about a lot of things (what is art?) but I found myself returning to the idea that language is a fickle, funny thing and that seeing how a computer interprets your words sheds some light on the nature of language itself. When I tried to get an image for the line "Now for me to get straight costs a big buck three eighty," the AI kept returning pictures of a large buck deer, standing majestically in a field, likely awaiting the bullet of a hunter. I knew what buck meant, in context, but why would a computer have any idea? So some of these images were drawn from lines in the song and some from descriptions of what that scene may have meant. So there you have it. I encourage everyone with hours, days, weeks, or months to spare to play around with these AI art tools. Even in their infancy, they are pretty impressive.

Finally made time for this, and I really dig it. I love the concept of irreverent relevance vis a vis WB's words of wisdom. And in the end it grooves, which is the best tribute.

https://somethingelsereviews.com/2022/03/13/walter-becker-medical-science-demo

Drop an email to walterbeckermusic@gmail.com and I think we can get you a copy.

https://www.historynet.com/texas-jack-book-review.htm Another nice review of my Texas Jack book, this one from Wild West Magazine. Wild West, after reviewing my book, also asked me to consider writing a feature article on Texas Jack for an issue coming out next year. Hopefully, that gets eyes on the book, which is always the goal.

I always felt there was a particular, and perhaps a peculiar, warmth to this song. He's more disappointed in the Lies and the Liar than mad. There is no apoplectic fury, just a sad acceptance that this is how it all went down. After I listened to this one a few times at the piano while working on chord voicings, I went back to the earlier WB Media release "Don't Let Us Go Down" and found some similar emotions expressed in a similar way: The late rays of the sun All but gone and settling slow The evening’s last gasp Drips down to the courtyard far below The flagstones flicker, fade to grey Don’t let us girl go down that way So much pop music is either overly simplistic or preciously pretentious. Walter could deliver literate and immaculately conceived lyrics, melodies, harmonies...the whole package, even on tracks he decided weren't the ones that best conveyed whatever it was he was trying to get across. Larry Klein said that working with Walter was like a masterclass in songwriting, and I think the insight offered by all of the things we've gotten to hear courtesy of @Moderator: D-Mod and through this project really drives that nail home in ways I didn't know I needed but am so damn delighted that I got.

Yeah, I kind of struggled with what to call that chord. I thought about labelling it as a B6/9 with an E in the bass, but I don't think that's quite right. I think this is another one of those times where you have this open sound with quite a lot of space between the notes of the chord, and some implied harmony that makes the chord hard to get right on just one instrument. I can tell you that what I'm playing on keys there is Ab-Db-Eb with the right hand and the bass part is going to E. I would think of that normally as an Emaj13, but in the key of Ab major it is more correctly (I think) an Fb. If you just play a Emaj13 you should end up pretty close.

There were pictures of the front page of some of these up on Julien's.

Danmar castanets? Nice. And its always good to have a rainstick, just in case.

Yeah, its still baffling to me to look at what amounts to a relatively short period of time and see the number of truly amazing songs that Walter was outputting. It makes me wonder how many great songs were written during the Dan era and never even tracked. I mean, we all know about The Second Arrangement and The Bear and all that, but those are the ones that were tracked and never released...I just think that the amount of brilliant material Walter was coming up with is staggering. Like, the output shows you how good he/they could be, and all of these new to us tracks show how often he could rise to that level of greatness.

I think your Lennon/McCartney analogy is worthwhile for sure. One thing I find in Walter's solo music is the unexpected musical turns that I always dug about Steely Dan. Donald does the lush beauty and stacked harmonies and horn charts to perfection, but melodically and harmonically, he seems to play it safe, while Walter sometimes jumps to a chord or a rhythm or a harmony or even a lyrical idea that is completely out of left field. Makes sense why that particular combination of musical genius was so fruitful for so long.

Doing the Lord's work.