1976 Rock Classic, Written After a Forgotten Song, Remains a Timeless Anthem 50 Years Later
Bad Company was one of the biggest rock bands of the 1970s, and their music remains timeless five decades later. But in 1976, the opening song for the band's third album, Run With the Pack, almost had a very different sound.
Written by founding Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers, the title track kicked off with a piano intro and an understated guitar riff before launching into lyrics about freedom and belonging. The song also featured a string arrangement at the end, composed by musician and producer Jimmy Horowitz.
"I wrote that song on the piano, and when I played it to the guys they fell right in," Rodgers once said in an interview posted on the official Bad Company website. "In my head, the strings were always a part of the song. Jimmy Horowitz came around to the studio session with a tape recorder in hand and while the track was playing, asked me how I wanted the strings in the background. I sang the part that I had been hearing in my head and he went off and wrote it up."
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Though never released as a single, "Run With the Pack" received massive radio airplay and helped propel the Run With the Pack album to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 album chart.
In 2014, Rodgers named Run With the Pack as his favorite Bad Company album after the band's iconic 1974 self-titled debut, per Rhino Records.
'Run With the Pack' was almost a different title track
Rodgers originally wrote an alternative version of "Run with the Pack" – then forgot all about it.
In a video posted to Bad Company's YouTube, Rodgers recalled that making the album Run With the Pack was "a constant searching for ideas that would work for the band."
"I was always looking for that song, a song that would be a single, an album title. In fact, I came up with the idea of a song called ‘Run with the Pack' because I thought that was what we were doing," he shared. "I wrote a song, and I promptly forgot it. So I wrote another one, and we recorded that by the same title, and it became the title track of the album."
Rodgers revealed that after recording the second song, he then remembered the original version about "facing a new dawn" and feeling something "pushing when you push it back."
The music legend added that his forgotten song included the lyrics, "Running. Running. Running. Running with a pack. You can make it. So get out there and shake it. And don't let them take it away."
"So that was the other version. And I suggested we do this too, but we'd already recorded this title track, and we couldn't really use two," Rodgers explained. "So that was the result of that."
It all worked out. "Run With the Pack" remains one of Bad Company's best-known anthems 50 years later, and it's hard to imagine it any other way.
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This story was originally published July 5, 2026 at 7:08 AM.