It is the quietest kind of success story in pop: a songwriter places his most tender ballad at the very end of his breakthrough album, never releases it as a single in his own country, and watches it become a standard anyway — carried there by other voices. We’re All Alone, the closing track of Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees, spent its first life as a B-side. Within eighteen months it had been recorded by Frankie Valli, the Walker Brothers and the Three Degrees, and turned into a transatlantic Top 10 hit by Rita Coolidge, a singer who had once arranged the backing vocals on Scaggs’ own records back in 1971.
Ten Years a Nearly Man
William Royce Scaggs — “Boz” was a school nickname — had been chasing this moment since boyhood. Raised in Dallas, he learned guitar at twelve and played in bands at St. Mark’s School alongside a classmate named Steve Miller, whose blues group the Marksmen gave Scaggs his first taste of a stage. The two reunited in the mid-sixties in the Steve Miller Band, with Scaggs contributing to its first two albums, before he drifted to Europe and recorded a solo debut, Boz, in Stockholm in 1965 — an American in Sweden, singing American music to almost no one.
The seventies brought a run of albums for Atlantic and then Columbia that critics admired and the public mostly filed under “promising”: Moments, Boz Scaggs & Band, My Time, Slow Dancer. Each was smoother and more assured than the last, and none of them broke through. Scaggs was forty-something in career years by the time he walked into Davlen — a veteran session-grade musician with a cult following, exactly the profile of a man whose best song might end up belonging to somebody else.
The Album Closer
By the time Scaggs came to record Silk Degrees in September 1975, he had been a nearly man of American music for a decade — a former Steve Miller Band guitarist with a run of admired, uncommercial solo albums behind him. Producer Joe Wissert surrounded him at Davlen Sound Studios in North Hollywood with a hand-picked team of young session players: keyboardist David Paich, drummer Jeff Porcaro and bassist David Hungate, musicians whose chemistry on these very sessions led them to form Toto.
The album they made was a sleek machine of pop, soul and disco — Lowdown, Lido Shuffle, What Can I Say — but Scaggs closed it with a whisper. We’re All Alone, written by Scaggs alone, is a piano-led ballad of consolation, sung as if through a window at the rain outside: close your eyes, pay the wind no mind, we’re all alone together. Placed last on the album, running just over four minutes, it felt like a benediction after the silk and swagger — and Columbia clearly agreed it was special, while just as clearly not knowing what to do with it.
A Hit Hiding on the B-Side
Columbia’s solution was to give the song away twice. We’re All Alone was pressed as the B-side of two of the album’s four singles, including Lido Shuffle, so that millions of buyers took it home underneath the hits; only in Australia was it granted an A-side of its own, where it peaked modestly. In America, the writer of one of the decade’s most loved ballads never had it on the charts under his own name.
It helped that the album itself was inescapable by then. Silk Degrees had been a slow burn — released in February 1976 to modest expectations, then carried upward month after month until it sat at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, where it would remain a fixture for over two years. Every copy sold put Scaggs’ ballad in another living room, and the men who played on it were in demand everywhere: David Paich, who had arranged much of the album’s silky orchestration, Jeff Porcaro and David Hungate carried the session’s chemistry straight into Toto, the band they formed in the wake of these recordings. The closing track was, in effect, being advertised by the most successful album of Scaggs’ life — it simply had somebody else’s singles on top of it.
Other singers noticed what Columbia had buried. Frankie Valli moved first, releasing his version in 1976 and taking it onto the Hot 100. In Britain, the Walker Brothers — whose records had been a formative influence on Scaggs himself — cut it for their album Lines, and the Three Degrees issued it as a UK single in March 1977. The song was becoming a standard in real time, passing from voice to voice while its composer watched from the B-side.
Jerry Moss Makes a Suggestion
The decisive version came from inside the family. Rita Coolidge knew Scaggs’ music from the inside out: back in 1971 she had sung backing vocals on his albums Moments and Boz Scaggs & Band — not merely singing, but arranging and directing the other backing singers. Now she was at A&M Records, and one day, as she later recalled, she was visiting label co-founder Jerry Moss in his office when he pointed her at the song. Silk Degrees, Moss told her, was in a million homes, and there was a song on it that was perfect for a woman to sing. Scaggs was not releasing it as a single. She should.
Produced by David Anderle for her album Anytime…Anywhere, Coolidge’s We’re All Alone was released as a single in June 1977 and became the version the world kept: No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and No. 6 in Britain. Where Scaggs sang the song like a man reasoning with himself at 2 a.m., Coolidge sang it like an embrace, and radio on two continents agreed with her. The recording earned her a Grammy nomination, and it remains the signature hit of her solo career — a curious fate for a song she was handed, almost as an afterthought, in a record executive’s office.
Scaggs, for his part, has never shown a trace of bitterness about the arrangement; singers of his generation understood that a song covered well is a pension as much as a compliment. And the royalties told their own story: Silk Degrees was the album that finally made him rich, but We’re All Alone was the song that kept working — in other people’s voices, in other people’s charts, year after year.
The Standard He Gave Away
The afterlife has been long. We’re All Alone went on to be recorded by at least twenty other artists across pop, soul and country — La Costa took it onto the American country chart in 1977, the same year as Coolidge’s pop hit, an almost unheard-of double for an album track its writer never singled — and in Japan, where Scaggs’ silky seventies records found an enormous second audience, it became something close to a national standard. Scaggs himself kept the song in his concert repertoire for the rest of his career, by then introducing a hit his own record company had once filed as filler for the flip side.
Silk Degrees peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, spent 115 weeks on the chart and sold five million copies in America alone — and its last, quietest track may be its most covered song. There are worse fates for a ballad than being sung by everybody. Scaggs wrote We’re All Alone to close an album. It ended up opening doors for half the singers who heard it — which is, in the end, exactly what the lyric promises: nobody who loved that record was ever really alone with it. Outside the rain begins, the song says, and the whole world, for fifty years now, has kept singing along.
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