Neil Diamond

you may be very right about this.

I'm going to listen again now.

Once I had a chart record of my own, I was no longer a kid knocking around on the streets.

I was now... Well, we didn't call them artists at that time.

We called them vocalists, but I was a vocalist.

And it was a whole different thing.

I was writing for myself, so I had to really dig in and write as well as I possibly could.

And I have to say, before that time, I don't know if I was doing that.

I was just writing and writing and writing, maybe just to get an advance from a publisher.

But there was not a lot of me in those songs, and Solitary Man was the first of a long line of me songs, my experience songs.

Well, that's usually how it went back then, although I was never a good enough writer to kind of write for some other singer to understand what they did best, the keys, the kind of song.

Usually you were told that so-and-so is coming up for a session in three weeks and they need a song of this type, and it was usually...

as close as possible to the song that they had previously, which was a hit, if it was a hit.

And you had to write a kind of like a copy of that in a way, because that's the way it worked in those days.

You have a hit record, and your next record should sound as much like the hit record as you can make it.

But I wasn't very good at it.

It's probably why I spent eight years down there in Timpanale and had very little success.

Nothing more really than selling a song and taking a small advance for it to get me through the week.

I think 67, something like that.

I recorded a couple of songs, including Solitary Man and Cherry Cherry, which was a big hit.