The last time I was taking a good, hard listen to a Walter Becker outtake, it was for a song about his yard. This time I again find myself hearing the late, great Steely Dan co-leader singing about some real estate that he owns. “This Is My Building” was first made public via a USB drive handed out during the dedication of the October, 2018 renaming of Becker’s childhood street to “Walter Becker Way.” The generous folks at Walter Becker Media have now made this track available to the masses hungry for fresh morsels of his underappreciated art.
There’s no mistaking that this a demo: a single keyboard, a rhythm track, Becker’s solitary vocal and virtually nothing else. That suggests this was rejected for Circus Money early on, and a half-assed guess is that it just didn’t fit in with the overall Jamaican vibe of the album because like most unfinished Becker songs, it’s chock full of potential.
The verses are so dense with words, you could almost rap ’em, and WB himself slips in and out of into half-speaking the lyrics. But in the usual Becker fashion it’s full of hip and heady “jokey play on words or tongue in cheek thing” in spite of his ironic insistence that it isn’t. There’s also another appearance of Becker’s business associate character Chandalur Singh, but beyond those two tidbits, I’ll need more time to parse this diction…much more time. It sure sounds slick though, and while Circus Money producer Larry Klein is listed as co-composer, this tune has all the hallmarks of Walter.
During the section that would have likely have been where some solo would have occurred, Becker scats in a way that suggests that he fancied a sax aside there.
Like the song enough to load it onto your smartphone amidst all your yuletide tunes? Go snag yourself a free, high quality download of “This Is My Building”.
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