In 1978, Boston had one of the biggest albums of the year with Don’t Look Back. The band’s sophomore release featured multiple hits, including the title song and the power ballad “A Man I’ll Never Be.” But the latter song didn’t come easy.
Written by lead guitarist Tom Scholz, “A Man I’ll Never Be” featured an acoustic guitar and piano melody leading to a soaring guitar solo, with emotional lyrics about not measuring up to expectations sung by singer Brad Delp.
The song, which reached No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100, took years to write.
In the liner notes to Boston’s Greatest Hits, Scholz revealed, “’A Man I’ll Never Be’ taught me how fickle inspiration can be. The complete verses for the song came to me one night as I was getting into bed, but I had to wait another six years to find a chorus.”
“A Man I’ll Never Be” was the only Don’t Look Back song not fully recorded and mixed at Scholz’s home recording studio. Hideaway Studios. According to Third Stage, the piano for the song was recorded at Northern Studio in Maynard, Mass.
Early versions of “A Man I’ll Never Be” were tested out on the road. Leading up to the release of the Don’t Look Back album, Delp said in an interview, “We’ve got more than enough material, and we’ve been working up material, but we had two or three songs before we even got off the road that we did in the live set that hadn’t been recorded. One of them is ‘A Man I’ll Never Be,’ it’s kind of a ballad-type thing, and we knew were gonna use that.”’
Scholz once explained that it sometimes took him weeks to get his songs the way he wanted them because he was a perfectionist. In an interview with The Ottowa Journal, he revealed that after doing the music tracks, he would then work on lyrics. Scholz noted that sometimes the words come right away, such as with “A Man I’ll Never Be.”
“I’m happier with the second album than I was with the first,” the Boston guitarist shared. “I like the music I have written for it much better. I thought when I was doing it, that it would be the ultimate that I could do but now I can see places where I think I can improve.”
Nearly 50 years after its release, “A Man I’ll Never Be” remains one of Boston’s most iconic power ballads—a song that took years to complete but was certainly worth the wait.
Related: 1976 No. 5 Hit Ranked One of the ‘Top Classic Rock Songs’ of All Time Became a Timeless Anthem