Q&A: Steely Dan's Walter Becker

And on Circus Money you get to play bass with Keith Carlock on drums.
And I get to play bass with Keith Carlock. Exactly. Not a bad deal — for me.

"Circus Money" is the only song on the record that you wrote without Larry. But I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that it's also the title of the record.
That was just a coincidence. Larry and I were going back and forth. He was coming to New York and I was going to California. He was working on other things and so on. And that particular tune I wrote during a holiday when he was I think on a vacation somewhere and I had taken some friends and dropped them off at the Big Apple Circus and I came home and had this idea for this thing. It's allusive with an "a." You don't exactly know what it means. So it's allusive and illusive. It feels like it must mean something, but you're not such which of the many things that it might mean it would be. I just thought it was a nice combination of words for a title.

As far as your mentality going into the studio — and perhaps feeling more comfortable behind the microphone — how is this process different from 11 Tracks of Whack?
I was definitely more comfortable singing, plus a lot of the singing for 11 Tracks I just did myself with the engineer, so it was a little more tedious. There was a learning curve for me as a singer making tracks that I got out of the way making 11 Tracks. And also, I realized I wanted to make this record with basically the same band, or slight permutations on the same band. Doing all the tracks and getting that kind of unity of playing and concept and feel. Playing without clicks and stuff like that, so it would be like the good old days of, you know, where the musicians set the tempos and the feels and everything. So that was the main thing that changed it. So once we had the basic tracks, which we did in 10 days or something, the basic music of the thing was there, you know? And it didn?t need to be invented as you go along. A lot of the things that Donald and I have worked on in recent years have been built from the ground up. And I get too old and too bored to do that anymore. And this is just much more fun. You have a bunch of people there and they all are contributing to the thing at the point where its taking shape for the first time, so you get a much richer — to me — a much richer texture to the thing.

I understand completely that you want do your own thing, but what if somebody were to ask, "Where's Donald on this record? Why isn't Donald a part of this?"
I think Donald might have been working on his own record at the same time that I was working on this. And I just ended up doing this pretty much as it fell together, and that's the way it fell together. So it wasn't really actively excluding him or anything, he was doing something else at the time. So it just worked out that way.

I wanted to ask you about a couple certain songs, like "Downtown Canon," one of my favorites. Is that an autobiographical song?
No, not really, although it was an early dream of mine that I never actually quite got to, to live in one of those lofts, or the dream pad on Greene Street, and live happily ever after.

Well, not happily ever after, because there's the inevitable breakup.
Well, you think it's happily ever after. Happily ever after is always in quotes.