Please Don't Go

This was KC & The Sunshine Band's first love ballad, and the last of their incredible five #1 hits in the United States. Like all their hits, it was written by their bass player/producer Rick Finch and frontman Harry Wayne Casey. In a Songfacts interview with Casey, he told the story. "Near the end of 1978, I was kind of anti-disco believe it or not, and I was trying to change a little bit from 'That's The Way (I Like It)' and 'Shake Your Booty' and all that," he said. "I was in the studio waiting for the next session to start, I'm sitting at the piano and I just start playing these chords, and I remember how beautiful they were. I decided that was the song I was going to record that day, and that became 'Please Don't Go.' I called in Mike Lewis, who did guitar arrangements and stuff, and he brought in the orchestra with the French horns and the flutes and put a full orchestra on the track."

Rick Finch told Songfacts about making this song: "I started recognizing that all the stuff we put out was uptempo. We didn't have any slow songs because I figured that slow songs were boring, and we didn't want to have people going to sleep on us. So I said, 'Okay, we better come up with something different.' So we started trying to reinvent ourselves without changing the sound too much. And that was really tough for us to do. So we had a little off point album, which would be the album called Who Do You Love. That's when we were trying to figure out what to do next. And then after that we came up with 'Please Don't Go.'"

Finch parted ways with KC & The Sunshine Band soon after this was released, and the split was far from amicable. He explains what led to it: "I remember being in Disney World in California, and there was a certain moment where everyone was just flipping out and we were almost fist-fighting. And I said, 'So this is what it's come to.' And I was like, 'Well, I don't want to be here anymore, and I quit.' As we grew, the differences got greater and the distractions got greater, and people were all over the place. So I'm like, 'OK, this is not what I want.' All the craziness on the road, and everything that was going on, I just didn't feel like I fit into that, I don't subscribe to that craziness. If you listen very closely when I'm producing the vocal on that, you'll hear the conviction in KC's voice, because that was the absolute last song that I did produce for KC & The Sunshine Band. And then I left, and the managers recommended that KC get rid of the band and just make it a solo career. So he goes and signs this deal with Epic, I came back for a few minutes to help patch up a song here or there, like 'Give It Up.'"