The 1970s File Feature
What Can I Say
What Can I Say — Boz Scaggs (1976) "What Can I Say" was one of the singles released from Boz Scaggs's landmark 1976 album Silk Degrees on Columbia Records, a…
01 The Story
What Can I Say — Boz Scaggs (1976)
"What Can I Say" was one of the singles released from Boz Scaggs's landmark 1976 album Silk Degrees on Columbia Records, a record that transformed Scaggs from a respected but commercially modest rock artist into a mainstream phenomenon and one of the defining voices of the sophisticated soft rock and blue-eyed soul movement that dominated the mid-to-late 1970s. The album was a collaborative triumph that brought together an exceptional group of studio musicians and producers, and "What Can I Say" exemplified the lush, polished sound that Silk Degrees delivered across its entire running time.
The creative team behind Silk Degrees was extraordinary by any measure. The album was produced by Joe Wissert, a Los Angeles-based producer with a track record of working with artists across the rock and soul spectrum. The studio musicians assembled for the sessions included David Paich, David Foster, and Jeff Porcaro, who were shortly to form Toto, along with the bassist David Hungate, another future Toto member. This concentration of talent in a single recording project was unusual even by the high standards of the Los Angeles session scene in the mid-1970s, and it contributed enormously to the album's distinctive sound: meticulously crafted, harmonically rich, rhythmically precise, and instantly accessible without being simplistic.
Boz Scaggs was born William Royce Scaggs in Ohio in 1944 and had grown up in Texas, where he developed an early connection to rhythm and blues that would remain central to his musical identity throughout his career. He had been a member of the Steve Miller Band in the late 1960s before pursuing a solo career that produced several well-regarded albums without achieving major commercial breakthrough. Silk Degrees changed everything. The album reached the top five on the Billboard 200 and eventually sold more than five million copies in the United States alone, one of the larger commercial successes of the decade for a solo male rock and soul artist.
"What Can I Say" was one of several tracks on Silk Degrees that demonstrated the album's fusion of rock, soul, and sophisticated pop. The song's arrangement was typical of the album's approach: the rhythm section was impeccably tight, the keyboard and guitar work elegant and restrained, and Scaggs's vocal delivery moved between the controlled and the passionate in a way that communicated genuine emotional engagement without the excesses associated with less disciplined performances in the blue-eyed soul genre.
The track performed well on the Billboard charts, contributing to the remarkable sustained chart success that Silk Degrees enjoyed across 1976 and into 1977. The album produced multiple charting singles, with "Lowdown" becoming the biggest commercial hit, reaching the top five on the Billboard Hot 100, while "What Can I Say" and "Lido Shuffle" also achieved significant chart placements. The combination of multiple hits from a single album gave Scaggs an unusually broad radio presence during the height of the album's commercial run.
Columbia Records's confidence in the album was well placed. The label had by the mid-1970s developed considerable expertise in marketing sophisticated rock and soul recordings to the adult audience that was emerging as a significant commercial force in the wake of the baby boom generation's maturation. Scaggs was an ideal artist for this demographic, offering music that was melodically accessible and rhythmically engaging but harmonically and lyrically more sophisticated than the straightforward pop that dominated the singles chart.
The Los Angeles recording sessions for Silk Degrees took place against a backdrop of considerable creative energy. The city's studio scene in the mid-1970s was arguably the most concentrated source of commercially successful popular music in the world, and the musicians who played on Scaggs's album were among the most in-demand session players working in that environment. The discipline and professionalism of the players contributed to the album's polished sound, but the performances retained a warmth and spontaneity that prevented the polish from becoming coldness. "What Can I Say" benefited from this combination of technical excellence and musical feeling in equal measure, establishing itself as one of the more enduring tracks in an album that has itself proven enduring as a classic of its era.
02 Song Meaning
What "What Can I Say" Is About
"What Can I Say" is a song of romantic uncertainty and emotional reckoning, structured around the narrator's struggle to find adequate words in the face of a complicated relationship situation. The title's rhetorical question establishes the emotional premise immediately: language feels insufficient to address what the narrator needs to communicate, whether that is an apology, an explanation, a declaration, or some combination of all three. This lyrical situation of expressive inadequacy was well suited to Boz Scaggs's particular vocal strengths, which included the ability to communicate emotional complexity through subtle gradations of delivery rather than through straightforward emotional declaration.
The song operates within the blue-eyed soul tradition of songs about romantic relationships that are more difficult than they appear from the outside, where the emotional dynamics between two people resist simple resolution. The narrator is not simply asking for forgiveness or simply expressing love but doing something more complicated: acknowledging that the relationship has become difficult to navigate while simultaneously expressing a continued desire to find a way through the difficulty. The title's question is thus both an admission of inadequacy and an implicit commitment to keep trying despite that inadequacy.
The production on "What Can I Say" by Joe Wissert served the song's emotional content precisely. The arrangement was sophisticated enough to convey the complexity of the situation being described while remaining accessible enough to connect with a broad audience. The rhythm section's controlled groove provided forward momentum without urgency, matching the emotional quality of someone who is proceeding carefully through a delicate situation. The keyboard work added harmonic richness that supported the vocal without overwhelming it, and Scaggs's delivery floated above the arrangement with the practiced ease of an experienced vocalist who knew exactly how much emotional force to apply at each moment.
Within the context of Silk Degrees, "What Can I Say" contributed to the album's overall emotional arc, which moved through various stages of romantic experience with a consistency of tone and quality that made the record feel like a complete artistic statement rather than a collection of individual tracks. The album's blue-eyed soul sensibility, its fusion of the emotional directness of African American soul and rhythm and blues with the production values and harmonic sophistication of Los Angeles studio pop, was expressed particularly clearly in this song.
Boz Scaggs had spent years developing the vocal approach that made "What Can I Say" work. His Texas upbringing had exposed him to the rawer end of the rhythm and blues tradition, and his time in the Steve Miller Band had given him experience with the rock end of the spectrum. Silk Degrees was the album on which all of these influences were synthesized into a mature and distinctive personal style, and "What Can I Say" was one of the clearest examples of that synthesis at work. The song's endurance in discussions of the album and the era reflects the quality of that synthesis: it was not merely a period piece that captured a specific moment in 1970s pop but a genuinely well-crafted piece of songwriting and performance that retained its emotional resonance for audiences encountering it decades after its initial release. The song's central emotional question, what one says when words feel inadequate to the demands of love and relationship, was timeless enough to remain relevant long after the specific sonic textures of its production had become associated with a particular historical moment.
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