Supertramp (album) - Background and Recording

Background and Recording

All the album's lyrics were written by Richard Palmer, since none of the other members of Supertramp were willing to write any. Palmer himself later said that he considered writing lyrics "like having to do school work" at the time. The music to the songs was all composed jointly by Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson.

The album was recorded entirely in night sessions running from 12 am to 6 am, due to a superstition on the part of the band members (fuelled by their having heard that Traffic and Spooky Tooth recorded at late hours) that there was some "magic" to recording at night. Roger Hodgson later recalled "Invariably our engineer, Robin Black, would fall asleep on us in the middle of the sessions, which were pretty intense as it was, because we fought a lot with Richard Palmer." He was fond of the resulting album, however, and commented over a decade later that "It was very naïve, but it has a good mood to it."

As the songs for Supertramp's third album, Crime of the Century, were introduced into the band's live set, the songs from Supertramp were all dropped, never to return. The two exceptions are "Home Again" and "Surely", which were occasionally played during encores for several years after.