Greatest-hits albums are not supposed to produce hits. They are victory laps — old glories repackaged for the Christmas market. But in November 1980, Boz Scaggs released a compilation called simply Hits!, and tucked inside it, among the monuments from Silk Degrees and Middle Man, sat one brand-new recording: “Miss Sun,” a shimmering piece of Los Angeles pop-soul written by David Paich. Within three months it had climbed to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, out-charting almost everything else Scaggs released that year.
The strange part is that the song was not new at all. By the time Scaggs recorded it, “Miss Sun” was three years old — a demo cut in 1977 by four session musicians who were about to become Toto, with a teenage Canadian singer named Lisa Dal Bello providing the female voice that made the record unforgettable. This is the story of a song that had to wait for its moment, and of the musical family that carried it there.
Written by David Paich, in the Middle of Everything
“Miss Sun” was written by David Paich — words and music both his, according to the credits on Hits! — and to understand the song you have to understand what Paich meant to Scaggs. The two had met in the Los Angeles studio scene, and Paich, together with bassist David Hungate and drummer Jeff Porcaro, had formed the rhythmic and harmonic core of Silk Degrees, Scaggs’ 1976 breakthrough. Paich co-wrote much of that album, including “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle.”
Scaggs has never been in any doubt about the debt. “David Paich is the single most important relationship I have in my musical career,” he said in a 2013 interview. “He has given me so much.” The partnership would stretch across decades — Paich co-wrote five songs on Silk Degrees and six tracks on Scaggs’ 2001 album Dig — and “Miss Sun” is one of its purest expressions: a Paich song so complete in itself that Scaggs’ job was simply to step inside it and sing.
A Demo Cut by Four Session Men
The song’s first recording dates to 1977. Paich, Hungate, guitarist Steve Lukather and Jeff Porcaro — the four musicians who, with singer Bobby Kimball and Jeff’s brother Steve Porcaro, were about to form Toto — were then the busiest young session players in Los Angeles. That year they were working on Scaggs’ album Down Two Then Left, and in the same period they were also playing on the self-titled debut album of a young Canadian singer, Lisa Dal Bello, produced by David Foster.
Between those sessions, the four men cut a batch of demos at Davlen Studios in Los Angeles — calling cards for the band they intended to form. “Miss Sun” was one of them, recorded in 1977 with Paich as its writer and guiding hand. It was, in effect, a Toto record made before Toto existed: the same keyboard-led, rhythmically immaculate sound that would soon conquer the charts is already fully formed in it.
The Voice on the Demo
The demo had one more ingredient, and it is the one nobody who heard the finished hit ever forgot. Lisa Dal Bello — later known simply as Dalbello — was brought in to sing on the “Miss Sun” demo track, adding the high, keening female vocal that answers the lead and floats over the choruses. She was connected to the circle through Jeff Porcaro, and her presence on the demo gave the song its signature: a duet that is not quite a duet, a woman’s voice that seems to arrive from somewhere brighter than the rest of the record.
Dal Bello’s part was not decorative; it was structural. The “Miss Sun” of the title is an absent, radiant figure, and Dal Bello’s voice is that figure in the recording — present everywhere, belonging to no verse. When Scaggs came to record the song three years later, there was never really a question of replacing her. As it happened, she was in Los Angeles at the time, and she was invited back to recreate exactly what she had sung on the demo. Few hit singles carry a vocal performance across two recordings and three years so literally — the woman on the 1980 hit is, note for note in spirit, the woman on the 1977 demo.
Three Years in a Drawer
And then — nothing. The demo did its job as part of the package that launched Toto, but “Miss Sun” was not included on Toto’s debut album in 1978, nor on any of the band’s records that followed. It simply sat in the vault while its makers became stars. The demo recording would not be released to the public until 1998, when it finally appeared on Toto XX, Toto’s collection of unreleased tracks — twenty-one years after it was cut.
Songs survive that kind of neglect only when somebody remembers them. Scaggs remembered. When Columbia assembled Hits! in 1980 — a compilation drawing mainly on the Silk Degrees and Middle Man material — Scaggs cut “Miss Sun” as the album’s one new recording, its only previously unreleased track. A three-year-old demo by his favourite musicians had become the fresh single on his greatest-hits album.
The 1980 Recording
Scaggs recorded his version with Bill Schnee producing and engineering, and the cast was, inevitably, the family. The credits on Hits! for “Miss Sun” read like a Toto session sheet: David Paich arranged the track and played keyboards, Moog bass and synthesizers — the Moog bass giving the record its soft, rounded pulse in place of a conventional bass guitar. Steve Porcaro added synthesizers. Steve Lukather played guitar. Jeff Porcaro played drums and percussion. And Lisa Dal Bello sang the backing vocal that was, in truth, a co-lead. Scaggs’ own contribution was the one thing the demo had lacked: a great lead singer, delivering Paich’s melody with the relaxed authority of a man who had been singing this circle’s songs for half a decade.
The result is a record that sounds like late-afternoon sunlight: electric piano and synthesizers in warm layers, Porcaro’s drums precise but unhurried, Lukather’s guitar kept tastefully in the background, and that female voice circling above it all. Hits! itself, released in November 1980 with a cover photograph by Albert Watson, was certified platinum by the RIAA — and its one new song was a major reason it felt like an event rather than a repackaging.
The Chart Run
Columbia released “Miss Sun” as a single on 1 November 1980. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 87 in the issue dated 29 November 1980 and climbed steadily through the winter — five weeks inside the Top 20 — before peaking at No. 14 on 7 February 1981, a position it held for two weeks. It spent 17 weeks on the chart in all, and Billboard ranked it No. 99 in its year-end survey for 1981.
It travelled, too: the single reached No. 17 in Canada in January 1981. And the number deserves context. No. 14 made “Miss Sun” Scaggs’ joint-second-biggest hit of his remarkable 1980–81 run — level with “Look What You’ve Done to Me,” his ballad from the Urban Cowboy soundtrack, and behind only the peaks of his Silk Degrees singles in his whole career to that point. It was also, though nobody announced it at the time, nearly the end: after Hits!, Scaggs withdrew from recording, and eight years passed before his next studio album, Other Roads (1988). “Miss Sun” was among the last sounds of his imperial phase.
The compilation it came from has had its critics. AllMusic’s Jason Elias, reviewing Hits! retrospectively, faulted the album for its lack of comprehensiveness as a summary of Scaggs’ career — a fair charge against a hits package drawn so narrowly from two albums. But that narrowness is also what makes the record, and “Miss Sun” within it, so coherent: this is not the whole of Boz Scaggs, it is the platinum-era Boz Scaggs, the singer as the Paich–Porcaro–Lukather circle defined him. The one new song does not interrupt that story. It completes it.
Why It Still Glows
“Miss Sun” occupies a unique place in three catalogues at once. For Scaggs, it is the graceful coda to his hit years — a hit drawn not from a new studio album but from the deep bench of his friendships. For Toto, it is a missing piece: a song from the band’s formation year that the public first heard in somebody else’s voice, and did not hear in theirs until 1998. And for Lisa Dal Bello, it remains one of the most beloved performances of her early career, the vocal that introduced her to American audiences years before her own reinvention as Dalbello.
Above all, it is a monument to the Los Angeles session scene at its peak — an era when the same six or seven musicians seemed to play on everything, and when a demo cut between other people’s sessions, by a band that did not yet have a name, could wait three years in a drawer and emerge as a Top 20 hit. The sun in the song is always just out of reach. The record, thankfully, is not.