Stephen Bishop's 'Careless' Turns 50: Lost Tracks Surface on Anniversary Vinyl
A limited 50th-anniversary vinyl edition of Stephen Bishop's debut album Careless arrived in stores on Friday, Aug. 14, carrying two songs recorded during the original sessions that never made the final cut. Billboard, which broke the news on Aug. 13, also premiered an animated video for one of those rediscovered tracks, "I Don't Know You Anymore." The other bonus song is titled "Back Again."
Bishop's team dug into the vault and found both tracks from the Careless era, written for the album but left off when it was assembled five decades ago. The anniversary package adds a 20-page booklet alongside the two bonus songs, pressed on custom splatter vinyl. Bishop's official merchandise store offered the edition for pre-order ahead of the street date.
Careless arrived in October 1976, according to multiple Discogs listings for US vinyl pressings. Billboard reports the album's release as fifty years ago this October without specifying a numeric year; Discogs catalogues fill that gap with 1976. Either way, the anniversary lands now.
The album's guest list reads like a roll call of 1970s radio. Eric Clapton, Art Garfunkel, Andrew Gold and Chaka Khan all appeared on the record. Its signature single, "On & On," peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the chart that tracks the most-consumed songs in the US each week across sales and streaming. A second single, "Save It for a Rainy Day," reached No. 22. "On & On" has since become a staple of what listeners now call yacht rock, the smooth soft-rock sound of the mid-1970s, and Keith Urban covered it on his own yacht rock album Flow State.
Bishop's songwriting reach extended well beyond his own recordings. His 1982 single "It Might Be You," the theme from the film Tootsie, reached the top 30 and earned an Oscar nomination for best original song for its writers Dave Grusin, Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Three years later, Bishop received his own nomination in the same category for writing "Separate Lives," performed by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin for the film White Nights.
Last August, Bishop released what he described as his final album, THIMK, featuring Sting, Clapton, Graham Nash, Garfunkel, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and Christopher Cross. The Careless reissue now follows that farewell.
On Oct. 9, Bishop will mark the anniversary with a "Celebrating 50 Years of Careless" event at the Clive Davis Theater inside the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. The 7:30 p.m. show is listed as sold out on his official website.
For fans who missed a ticket, the vinyl is the keepsake — two lost songs from a half-century-old debut, finally carried home.
