Walter Becker Quotes

I study what's happening in music. I want to sound different than everybody else.

I get bored of music really easily, so I always try and make music that makes sense, but then it's just a little bit wrong.

It's all about the balance. For musicians, me personally, you just can't keep doing covers or mash-ups. It would get old pretty fast.

I have a curiosity that compels me to find ways to make music that are fresh and new.

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

Any good music must be an innovation.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other. Sometimes you need to take a departure from what you do to something that's slightly different in order to get inspiration.

What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.

I like to experiment when it comes to music.

When you say, 'Man, what kind of music does Outkast make?' You be like, 'They make Outkast music.' What kind of music does N.E.R.D. make? They make N.E.R.D. music. I want to be one of those people, because there's so many layers to the music I create that I don't want people to expect me to do one thing.

I love rearranging and reimagining tunes, so I want my audience to enjoy hearing songs in a new way and make their own discoveries.

People come in because they like 'Old Town Road.' They'll find out that I'm just not going to stick to that.

When some artistes give a hit song, they keep repeating themselves in the same genre. I always try to create something new.

Every movie you score you hope is unlike anything you have done before. You are always trying to not sound like yourself.

I like that people are still trying to guess what kind of music I'm making.

All I ever wanted to do, personally, was bring something new to what I loved: the thing that I loved the most, the music that I loved the most.

We always want to do covers, but we found it kind of boring to do covers of bands in our genre, and we were always asked to do those.

I don't like to write the same song twice.

In hip-hop, what you have is you have a lot of formulaic-type bands or rappers that come up. They saw something on the radio, and they want to mimic that formula. And that's just boring. I don't wanna record something just to make money; I want to record something to enjoy it and have fun because I'm a music lover.

People get to a certain age and success that they stop being curious. I'm still curious because I haven't really had that success. I've never done a record to catch whatever the latest sound is. It's my love of music, eclectic-ness, and the music that I heard my entire life that seeps in. That's what you're hearing.

The one thing you don't want is that stale sound when you've done a line so much you can't find a fresh approach to it. Drop it.

I am optimistic about the future of music.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.