RIP Walter Becker
Jim Murray
Helping businesses send the right messages in a consistent voice.
It was the lead single off their first album "Can't Buy a Thrill".
Sometimes when you hear one song, you just know that it gonna be one of the bands that will be a big part of your musical life.
Over the years, I collected all their albums but Can't Buy A Thrill and Aja rank closest to my heart. The quality of their storytelling, the world class musicianship on all their albums and the quintessential American nature of their output gave them a purity that I loved.
Their music was always listenable and they sort of defied categorization but they were very popular nonetheless. Whenever I went into a store and got some crappy piece of MOR shit music stuck in my head, I would come home and put on some Steely Dan, believe that you just could not go wrong having as 'Dan' tune stuck there.
Today I heard that Walter Becker has passed away. Don't know how. All I know is that half of one of the greatest songwriting does in modern music history is gone, and all lovers of great modern music are as saddened by that loss as I am.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/walter-becker-steely-dan-co-founder-dead-at-67-w500956
""
More articles by Jim
Smoke Signals: My Story Collection
Over the past two years, recovering from some pretty serious spinal surgery, I started to wonder if the four months I spent in hospital and the surgery itself had affected my writing ability. So in ad...
The Very Difficult Process Of Learning To Write For Yourself.
I write a lot of stuff here on social media. Sometimes I hit big because I strike a nerve. Sometimes I hit small because what I’m writing makes people uncomfortable. That’s life in the world of social...
The 80/20 Differential And What It Means To Me
(The 80/20 rules, as it applies to work situations is also known and the Pareto Principle.This is my own take on it.) Most of the time, I'm pretty serious as a writer. But every now and then, maybe 20...