Beautiful Loser - Live In Detroit/1975

This song is about people who set their goals so low, they never achieve anything. It is not about Seger personally. He told Creem magazine in a 1986 interview: "A lot of people think I wrote 'Beautiful Loser' about myself. I got the idea for that song from a book of Leonard Cohen poetry by the same name. The song was about underachievers in general. I very rarely write about myself that much. I draw on my own experiences like anyone else, but I'm not what you'd call auteuristic. I'm not like my songs at all. I'm a lot more up person than what I write." Cohen's book that Seger refers to is called Beautiful Losers.

Seger took almost a year to write this. He played around with many different arrangements of the song until he got it right. In a 1994 interview with Music Connection, he explained: "I've never written the lyrics and tried to build the music around that. It's usually a feel or a verse or a chorus, and the lyrics will come after I've decided that a certain pattern or groove or rhythm is cool. Then I'll start singing gibberish over that and just find a lyrical idea that fits the ideas that I started out with. Other times I'll just sit down and say, 'I wanna write a song called this.' That's how 'Beautiful Loser' happened. I just loved the title, which I got from a book of poetry from Leonard Cohen called Beautiful Losers, with an 's,' and I thought it was a really cool title. Actually, I wrote three or four songs called 'Beautiful Loser' until I came up with the one that worked. But that's a pretty rare thing."

Glenn Frey, a member of the Eagles and a friend of Seger's, was one of the first people Seger played this for. Frey loved it and helped Seger tweak it before it was released.