On his first studio album in seven years, Plano-raised singer Boz Scaggs dips into the Great American Songbook and also revisits a tune he wrote before “Lido Shuffle” and “Lowdown” made him a star in the ’70s.
Detour features the 81-year-old singer wrapping his earthy tenor around hits by Frank Sinatra (“Angel Eyes”), Bing Crosby (“The Very Thought of You”) and New Orleans R&B queen Irma Thomas (the Allen Toussaint-penned “It’s Raining”). But eagle-eyed observers will also notice “I’ll Be Long Gone,” a ballad Scaggs wrote early in his career.
After graduating St. Mark’s School of Texas in ’62, he moved to San Francisco during the “Summer of Love” in 1967 to rejoin his former Dallas bandmate Steve Miller. The reunion went kaput a year later as the two butted heads over musical direction.
But Scaggs stayed in the Bay Area, where his neighbor, Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, helped him get a contract with Atlantic Records and co-produced 1969’s Boz Scaggs at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. While that album’s “I’ll Be Long Gone” is a highly produced orchestral soul tune, Scaggs’ new version is bare-bones piano jazz.
Detour comes out Oct. 17 on Concord Records.
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