Regional Interests

Boz Scaggs Processes The Past And Rebuilds For The Future

By Renee Montagne,

Renee Montagne, Sarah Handel

Published July 29, 2018 at 5:02 AM PDT

"It's really a part of the healing process and the coming-to-terms-with-it-all process," Boz Scaggs says of writing an album after losing his home to wildfires.

Boz Scaggsis likely best known for his affiliation with the Steve Miller Band or 1976 songs like "Lido Shuffle" and "Lowdown." But through the years, he's also been crafting jazz and blues albums in homage to his earliest influences. His new album Out of the Blues, due out July 27, is a continuation of that practice, capping off an unofficial trilogy of albums that channel his upbringing in Oklahoma and Texas while listening to blues and early rock and roll.

Scaggs said he started playing the blues because it was a basic and simple form of guitar, but by now, he's steeped in its history. He recounts the way the blues spread to and across the United States — coming first from the Caribbean and up through Cuba, into New Orleans and up the river to the Mississippi Delta, then to cities, radio and clubs.

"As it evolved, it picked up subtleties from every stop and from everyone who used the form," he says. "If you really get back to some of the roots of it, there's a great deal of nuance and that nuance is very important to someone who listens to the blues."

Out of the Blues includes covers of songs by Bobby "Blue" Bland, Jimmy Reed and Samuel "Magic Sam" Maghett, as well as a cover of Neil Young's "On the Beach." The Young song deals with loss and despair, which Scaggs faced directly when his house and all its contents burned in the Napa, Calif., wildfires last year. "It simply all is gone," he says. "It has you reaching for all sorts of answers and conclusions and ways to take it in."

In the fire, Scaggs lost every handwritten lyric he'd ever written — lyrics on books, legal pads and cocktail napkins from across his 50-year music career. "Some songs take a couple of pages to write, and some songs take 15 or 20 pages to write. And they're all there, all the ideas, and you can feel everything that went into that song," he says. "I regret having lost those papers, specifically."

Writing the album was one of the ways to help process this loss, he says. "It's really a part of the healing process and the coming-to-terms-with-it-all process."

Web intern Emily Abshire contributed to this story.

Regional Interests

Renee Montagne

Renee Montagne is co-host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the U.S. She has hosted the newsmagazine since 2004, broadcasting from NPR West in Culver City, California, with co-host Steve Inskeep in NPR's Washington, D.C. headquarters. Montagne is a familiar voice on NPR, having reported and hosted since the mid-1980s. She hosted All Things Considered with Robert Siegel for two years in the late 1980s, and previously worked for NPR's Science, National and Foreign desks. Montagne traveled to Greenwich, England, in May 2007 to kick off the yearlong series, "Climate Connections," in which NPR partnered with National Geographic to chronicle how people are changing the Earth's climate and how the climate is impacting people. From the prime meridian, she laid out the journey that would take listeners to Africa, New Orleans and the Antarctic. Since 9/11, Montagne has gone to Afghanistan nine times, travelling throughout the country to speak to Afghans about their lives. She's interviewed farmers and mullahs, poll workers and President Karzai, infamous warlords turned politicians and women fighting for their rights. She has produced several series, beginning in 2002 with 'Recreating Afghanistan" and most recently, in 2013, asking a new generation of Afghans — born into the long war set off by the Soviet invasion — how they see their country's future. In the spring of 2005, Montagne took Morning Edition to Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul ll. She co-anchored from Vatican City during a historic week when millions of pilgrims and virtually every world leader descended on the Vatican. In 1990, Montagne traveled to South Africa to cover Nelson Mandela's release from prison, and continued to report from South Africa for three years. In 1994, she and a team of NPR reporters won a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of South Africa's historic presidential and parliamentary elections. Through most of the 1980s, Montagne was based in New York, working as an independent producer and reporter for both NPR and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Prior to that, she worked as a reporter/editor for Pacific News Service in San Francisco. She began her career as news director of the city's community radio station, KPOO, while still at university. In addition to the duPont Columbia Award, Montagne has been honored by the Overseas Press Club for her coverage of Afghanistan, and by the National Association of Black Journalists for a series on Black musicians going to war in the 20th century. Montagne graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, as a Phi Beta Kappa. Her career includes serving as a fellow at the University of Southern California with the National Arts Journalism Program, and teaching broadcast writing at New York University's Graduate Department of Journalism.

See stories by Renee Montagne

Renee Montagne

Renee Montagne, one of the best-known names in public radio, is a special correspondent and host for NPR News.

Sarah Handel

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