Neil Diamond is an American singer-songwriter and occasional actor.
Neil Diamond was born into a Jewish Russian-Polish family, the son of a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, attending Erasmus Hall and Abraham Lincoln High Schools. At Erasmus Hall, he took part in SING! and sang in the school choir with Barbra Streisand, who then spelled her name “Barbara.” At Lincoln, the school from which he received his high school diploma, he was a member of the fencing team. He later attended NYU on a fencing scholarship, specializing in épée. In a live interview with TV talk show host Larry King, Neil Diamond explained his decision to study medicine. He said: “I actually wanted to be a laboratory biologist. I wanted to study. And I really wanted to find a cure for cancer. My grandmother had died of cancer. And I was always very good at the sciences. And I thought I would go and try and discover the cure for cancer.” However, during his senior year a music publishing company made him an offer he could not refuse to write songs for $50 a week and this started him on the road to stardom.
Diamond spent his early career as a writer in the Brill Building, and had an early success writing “I’m a Believer”, “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow),” and Love to Love which were recorded by The Monkees. There is a popular misconception that Diamond wrote and composed these songs specifically for the “Pre-Fab Four.” In reality, Diamond had written, composed and recorded these songs to release himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended, but happy, consequence of this was that Diamond began to gain fame not only as a singer and performer, but also as a songwriter. “I’m a Believer” was the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966. Other notable artists who covered early Neil Diamond songs were Elvis Presley, who interpreted “Sweet Caroline” and “And The Grass Won’t Pay No Mind”, the English hard rock band Deep Purple which interpreted “Kentucky Women”, Lulu, who covered “The Boat That I Row”, and Cliff Richard, who released versions of “I’ll Come Running”, “Solitary Man”, “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, “I Got The Feelin’(Oh, No, No), and “Just Another Guy”.
Solitary Man
“Solitary Man” was Diamond’s debut single as a recording artist.
While nominally about young romantic failure, parts of the lyric:
Don’t know that I will,
But until, I can find me
…
I’ll be, what I am —
A solitary man …
Solitary man.
have been closely identified with Diamond himself, as evinced by a 2008 profile in The Daily Telegraph: “This is the Solitary Man depicted on his first hit in 1966: the literate, thoughtful and melodically adventurous composer of songs that cover a vast array of moods and emotions …” Indeed, Diamond himself would bemusedly tell interviewers in the 2000s, “After four years of Freudian analysis I realised I had written ‘Solitary Man’ about myself.”
He recorded two versions of the song. One of them had his harmonic vocal track on the Chorus of the song. The other version was him singing the song alone, without his prerecorded harmony on the track.
A 2005 Rolling Stone retrospective would write, “‘Solitary Man’ remains the most brilliantly efficient song in the Diamond collection. There’s not a wasted word or chord in this two-and-a-half minute anthem of heartbreak and self-affirmation, which introduced the melancholy loner persona that he’s repeatedly returned to throughout his career.
http://djallyn.org/media/SolitaryMan.flvMelinda was mine
‘Til the time
That I found her
Holding Jim
Loving himThen Sue came along
Loved me strong
That’s what I thought
Me and Sue
But that died tooDon’t know that I will
But until I can find me
A girl who’ll stay
And won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am
A solitary man
Solitary manI’ve had it to here
Bein’ where
Love’s a small world
Part-time thing
Paper ringI know it’s been done
Havin’ one
Girl who loves you
Right or wrong
We go strongDon’t know that I will
But until I can find me
The girl who’ll stay
And won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am
A solitary man
Solitary manDon’t know that I will
But until I can find me
A girl who’ll stay
And won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am
A solitary man
Solitary manA Solitary man
Solitary manSolitary …. man
- Audio from the 1966 album, The Feel of Neil Diamond:
Break