Baby Come Back

Beckett told Gary James that it was definitely a 50/50 effort, with Crowley coming up with the verse chord and Beckett the riff, written over days not weeks. He said it started off from a breakup of his own, while Songfacts and Stereogum say both men were going through breakups, and Casey Kasem said on American Top 40 on November 5, 1977 that they wrote it after breaking up with girlfriends. After Moss joined, the band played it acoustically in offices and was passed on by a whole bunch of people before Lambert and Potter's office; they contacted Al Coury at RSO, played it for the Bee Gees, and Robert Stigwood loved it. A MusicRadar headline says Clive Davis passed on it, saying I don't hear a hit; the article body was not retrievable. The song runs 3:28 on the single, 4:15 in the Wikipedia song article and 4:10 on the album, and the album version ends in a guitar-solo fade-out.

It was the lead single in late 1977 with "Love Is Where You Find It" on the B-side, and was number one on the Hot 100 for three weeks in January 1978, replacing the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love"; it was seventh on the 1978 year-end chart, number one in Canada, 4 in New Zealand and 32 in the UK, and is RIAA gold. Beckett sings lead, Crowley plays acoustic and electric piano, Moss bass, Friesen drums, maracas and congas and Cook synthesizers and clavinet. Biz Markie sampled it in "Things Get a Little Easier" (1989) and Freeway in "Doing Anything" (2008). It was in The Simpsons' "Homer Alone" (1992), a Swiffer ad in 2008 and films including FM, Roll Bounce and Transformers. Ocean Alley covered it for Triple J's Like a Version in 2018, Lisa Stansfield recorded it, and Keith Urban included it on his 2026 album Flow State. We do not know which version our upload is.