Raised in Dallas, Texas, befriended as a child prodigy by Les Paul and T-Bone Walker, and after college at the University of Wisconsin, Steve Miller got an intense "musical graduate school" at nearby Chicago's South Side with blues masters Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells, and Jimmy Reed. Steve Miller and schoolboy chum Boz Scaggs took their blues internship westward to the vibrant San Francisco musical scene in 1967, where the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape were landing major record label deals. Steve would land the most lucrative deal of them all and proceeded to record four critically acclaimed records by 1973.

It's important to note that Fly Like An Eagle was Steve Miller's ninth studio album. Having scored his first # 1 single three years earlier with "The Joker", Steve shares with InTheStudio host Redbeard how he managed to get off the album/tour, album/tour merry-go-round long enough to get his bearings, set his own course and deliver the album that would seal a Hall of Fame career.

Steve Miller says, "We had been basically touring nonstop for eleven years... I shut everything down and went to my house. I got a tape recorder, a multi-track 8-track tape recorder set up in my living room, and started first resting, then thinking, then writing.