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
The accompanying video of the Steel Stacks (in Bethlehem PA) brought back great memories of seeing SD there in 2014. When I first got there and saw basically some bleachers and folding chairs set up open air in front of the stage (with the blast furnaces behind) I thought the show was going to suck. Turned out to be, in my opinion, the best SD show I'd seen. The sound was, for once, perfect, and the band was super tight. Based on WB's Hey 19 rap that night, he seemed to really enjoy it too.
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!
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.