Dwight Twilley (born June 6, 1951, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an American pop/rock singer and songwriter, best known for the Top 20 hit singles “I’m on Fire” (1975) and “Girls” (1984). Twilley and Phil Seymour performed as the Dwight Twilley Band through 1978, and Twilley has performed as a solo act since then.

Twilley and Phil Seymour met in Tulsa in 1967 at a theater where they had gone to see The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, and soon began writing songs and recording together. They continued their partnership over the next several years under the name Oister. Twilley wrote all the songs and played guitar and piano, Seymour played drums and bass, and both sang leads and harmonies. Guitarist Bill Pitcock IV played lead guitar on most of their tracks.

Twilley attended Edison High School and went to Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College from 1971 to 1973. Twilley and Seymour eventually decided to leave Tulsa and try to be discovered at a recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. By sheer chance, the first studio that they wandered into was Sun Studio, where they met, according to Twilley, “some guy named Phillips.” After listening to a cassette of their folk/pop/country blend, Jerry Phillips (son of Sun founder Sam Phillips) referred them to the Tupelo, Mississippi studio of former Sun artist Ray Harris, whom both Twilley and Seymour credited for introducing them to rockabilly and adding a harder edge to their sound.

Ultimately, Twilley and Seymour went to Los Angeles to find a label, where they ironically signed with Shelter Records, a label co-owned by Denny Cordell and Tulsa’s Leon Russell, in 1974. Cordell promptly changed the group’s name from Oister to the Dwight Twilley Band, which set the seeds for future problems arising from Seymour’s anonymity in the partnership.

Their first single, “I’m on Fire”, reached #16 on the charts in 1975 with relatively little promotion, largely because the band was in England recording its first album, tentatively called Fire, with producer Robin Cable at Trident Studios. The photos used on the single’s picture sleeve were low quality from a photo booth, even less professional than the band’s first promo picture (right). The unexpected success of the self-produced “I’m On Fire” caused most of the English tracks to be relegated to a second album, thereafter known as The B Album. Leon Russell then permitted the band to record new tracks at his 40-track home studio, where one of the engineers was R