One Week One Band: Boz Scaggs - “We’re All Alone” When I was younger I was certain there were only two kinds of closing tracks, sad ones and glad ones. You get older. Binaries fall away. Now there are three kinds: 1) a final, hopeful thought; 2) a restatement of terms (a process favored in hip-hop, intros and outros meant to codify the borders of a recorded world); or 3) a long vertiginous drop. Boz Scaggs’s “We’re All Alone,” taken from Silk Degrees, is preceded by “Lido Shuffle,” a single, which reached No. 11 on the US pop chart. “We’re All Alone” is also the b-side of the “Lido Shuffle” single, again, functionally, an ending. “Lido” was featured on the soundtrack for the movie FM, which contained the titular Steely Dan song, a song about people listening to the radio in an abandoned bunker somewhere, I assume, refining the mind-body connection. The soundtrack also included Linda Rondstadt’s rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” a more straightforward song in which people no longer have any sense of the future. At some point the concept of a future had ended, been replaced. There’s apocalyptic talk now—there’s always apocalyptic talk—but at least in the artifacts of the seventies there is a running current of dread, a feeling that something had imperceptibly slipped from the social contract, into a dead zone. I wrote about “We’re All Alone” for One Week One Band but mostly wrote about Los Angeles and the ocean. It got long. I should credit John Darnielle for noticing the detail about the front cover and back cover. I would like to thank my friends Matt Ealer and Angela Serratore for reading this piece, editing it, suggesting things about it, attending to it with devotion and care.

One Week One Band: Boz Scaggs - “We’re All Alone”

When I was younger I was certain there were only two kinds of closing tracks, sad ones and glad ones. You get older. Binaries fall away. Now there are three kinds: 1) a final, hopeful thought; 2) a restatement of terms (a process favored in hip-hop, intros and outros meant to codify the borders of a recorded world); or 3) a long vertiginous drop. Boz Scaggs’s “We’re All Alone,” taken from Silk Degrees, is preceded by “Lido Shuffle,” a single, which reached No. 11 on the US pop chart. “We’re All Alone” is also the b-side of the “Lido Shuffle” single, again, functionally, an ending. “Lido” was featured on the soundtrack for the movie FM, which contained the titular Steely Dan song, a song about people listening to the radio in an abandoned bunker somewhere, I assume, refining the mind-body connection. The soundtrack also included Linda Rondstadt’s rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” a more straightforward song in which people no longer have any sense of the future. At some point the concept of a future had ended, been replaced. There’s apocalyptic talk now—there’s always apocalyptic talk—but at least in the artifacts of the seventies there is a running current of dread, a feeling that something had imperceptibly slipped from the social contract, into a dead zone.

I wrote about “We’re All Alone” for One Week One Band but mostly wrote about Los Angeles and the ocean. It got long. I should credit John Darnielle for noticing the detail about the front cover and back cover.
I would like to thank my friends Matt Ealer and Angela Serratore for reading this piece, editing it, suggesting things about it, attending to it with devotion and care.