• Writer: Rick Davies
• Producer: Supertramp and Peter Henderson
• Recorded: Late 1978/early 1979 at Village Recorder and Crystal Sound in Los Angeles
• Released: March 1979
• Players:
  Rick Davies — vocals, piano
  Roger Hodgson — guitar, vocals
  John Helliwell — vocals, keyboards
  Dougie Thompson — bass
  Bob Siebenberg — drums
  Album: Breakfast In America (A&M, 1979)
• Also On:
  Paris (A&M, 1980)
  The Very Best Of Supertramp (A&M, 1992)
  It Was The Best Of Times (EMI, 1999)
  and other compilations
• Singer-pianist Rick Davies and singer-guitarist Roger Hodgson formed Supertramp in 1969. They were financed by Dutch millionaire Stanley August Miesegaes, who was known as Sam.
• The group’s name is taken from W.H. Davies‘s 1910 book The Autobiography Of A Supertramp.
• After two unsuccessful albums, Davies and Hodgson fired the other members and brought in singer-keyboardist John Helliwell, bassist Dougie Thompson, and drummer Bob Siebenberg in 1973.
• After gaining a small but loyal following with previous albums, Supertramp broke big with Breakfast In America. The album hit Number One on the Billboard 200, where it spent six weeks.
• “Goodbye Stranger” was the album’s second single, and it peaked at Number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was less successful in Britain, where it only reached Number 57.
• Davies remembered writing the song on a piano at his neighbor’s house: “I wrote that in my hometown when I went back to visit one time. The original piano I actually started playing on, my next door neighbor’s — my parents didn’t have a piano, so I’d go next door and learn to play and stuff. She used to make me tea, so I used to play around waiting for my tea. I just went back to visit one time, and for some reason I came up with this song. I hadn’t written for a while. It just all came up at once.”
• Davies admitted that the song’s lyrics, which are about a one-night stand, were taken from some of the band’s road adventures — “Yeah, it is. It turned out to be that. I didn’t know what it was when I wrote it.”

FAST FORWARD:

• Hodgson left Supertramp in 1983 for a solo career.
• Davies led Supertramp without Hodgson for another five years, but the group disbanded in 1988.
• Davies reassembled Supertramp in 1996 to record Some Things Never Change. The group followed that up with a world tour in 1997.

Supertramp released the album Slow Motion in 2002, and they toured Europe, Canada, and the U.S. behind it, but things have been quiet since then.