1976 · Behind the Songs
Co-written with a future member of Toto, the Silk Degrees single showed how much soul could fit inside perfect polish.
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Silk Degrees is remembered for its giants — “Lowdown,” “Lido Shuffle,” “We’re All Alone” — but the album’s deepest groove might be the one that opens it. “What Can I Say,” the leadoff track of Boz Scaggs’ 1976 masterpiece, is a slow-burning soul-funk workout co-written with David Paich, a twenty-two-year-old keyboardist who would soon help found Toto. It was released as a single, it slinked onto the radio, and it announced in no uncertain terms that this was going to be a different kind of blockbuster: one built on feel rather than flash.
The song’s creation story is the story of Silk Degrees itself. Scaggs, coming off years as a respected but commercially modest artist, assembled a band of Los Angeles session aces — Paich on keyboards, Jeff Porcaro on drums, David Hungate on bass — and gave them room to play. The chemistry was instant and historic: within two years, Paich, Porcaro, and Hungate would form Toto, and the sound they developed with Scaggs would conquer the world. “What Can I Say” is where you can hear that future being born, in real time.
What the track captures is the sound of virtuosity in service of restraint. Porcaro’s drumming — already, at twenty-two, the most imitated in Los Angeles — never shows off; it simply never falters, laying down a groove so deep it feels geological. Paich’s keyboards add color and counter-melody without cluttering. And Scaggs, the ostensible star, sings with a lover’s patience, content to let the band carry the weight. It’s a master class in the art of holding back, played by musicians who could have played anything.
The lyric matches the music’s late-night confidence. “What Can I Say” is a lover’s argument for staying — not a plea but a proposition, delivered with the assurance of a man who knows the groove is on his side. Scaggs had always been a soul singer in a rocker’s world, and here the balance is perfect: the blue-eyed soul of his voice, the funk of the band, the polish of the production, all fused into something seamless. It’s seduction as musicianship, and it works.
Recording and release
Silk Degrees was produced by Joe Wissert and recorded with the cream of the L.A. session world, and “What Can I Say” was its opening statement — the track Scaggs chose to introduce his new sound. As a single, it followed the album’s bigger hits to radio, where its slinky groove stood out from everything around it. It didn’t need to be the biggest hit on the album; it needed to set the table, and it did, establishing the sound-world — polished, soulful, quietly funky — that the rest of the record would inhabit.
The Paich co-write is the song’s secret history. At twenty-two, Paich was already a veteran of the L.A. studios, and his partnership with Scaggs on this track — melody, chords, and that unmistakable keyboard touch — pointed directly toward the sound he would soon take global with Toto. Listen to “What Can I Say” and then to Toto’s debut: the DNA is unmistakable. Scaggs didn’t just make a hit album; he incubated a band, and this song is the laboratory where it happened.
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The groove that launched a band
It’s tempting to hear “What Can I Say” as a footnote to Toto’s story, but that gets it backward: the song is the main event, and Toto is the footnote. What Paich, Porcaro, and Hungate learned making Silk Degrees — the discipline of the groove, the virtue of restraint, the way polish can serve soul rather than smother it — became the foundation of their own band’s sound. But on this track, they’re not Toto; they’re Boz Scaggs’ band, and they’re playing for the song, not for themselves.
That selflessness is what makes the record timeless. Fashions in production have come and gone — the seventies’ warmth, the eighties’ sheen, the nineties’ grit — but a great groove played by great musicians never dates. “What Can I Say” sounds as good now as it did in 1976, not because it was ahead of its time but because it was outside of time: the sound of players so good they didn’t need an era to belong to.
What to listen for
Start with Jeff Porcaro’s drums. Before he was the most recorded drummer in pop, he was the twenty-two-year-old holding down “What Can I Say,” and you can hear the legend in embryo: the perfect time, the ghost notes that seem to shimmer, the hi-hat work that turns rhythm into melody. It’s a clinic in groove drumming, and it’s the foundation everything else stands on.
Then listen to the keyboards. Paich’s playing is the song’s harmonic brain — the chords that give the groove its sophistication, the fills that answer Scaggs’ vocal, the textures that keep the track breathing. It’s the sound of a young writer-producer discovering his voice, and that voice would soon be heard on some of the biggest records of the next decade. Here, it’s in service of someone else’s song, and it’s perfect.
Finally, listen to Scaggs himself. His vocal on “What Can I Say” is a study in relaxed authority — never pushing, never showing off, just riding the groove with the confidence of a man who knows he’s fronting the best band in Los Angeles. The restraint is the performance: in a decade of rock screamers and soul shouters, Scaggs proved that control could be the most exciting thing on the record.
And consider what the song represents in Scaggs’ story. Before Silk Degrees, he was a musician’s musician — respected by everyone, bought by too few. “What Can I Say” and the album around it changed that without changing him: the polish was new, but the taste, the restraint, the soul were the same qualities he’d always had. The world finally caught up to Boz Scaggs, and this is the sound of the meeting.