Terry Gross

You know, it's funny, the common wisdom goes when telling the story of like songwriters from the Brill Building and the Beatles is that the Beatles changed everything.

After the Beatles, bands started writing their own songs.

It drove out the professional songwriters.

But of course, the Monkees are a band that's, you know, a kind of fabricated band copying the Beatles.

And you have this tremendous success writing for them.

And in that sense, like the Beatles success inadvertently really helped you as a songwriter.

My guest is Neil Diamond.

Here's his version of I'm a Believer.

I want to ask you about another of your songs.

And this is also an earlier song.

It's Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon.

And the urge overkill version of this was used by Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction.

Can you tell us the story behind the song?

How did you find out that Quentin Tarantino was going to use a version of this song for Pulp Fiction?

So what did you think of the movie?

How come you loved the movie but didn't love the script?

What was different actually seeing it?

Well, here's a song you wrote to please your teenage fans, and now it's going to be used in an overdose scene, in a drug overdose scene.

Not what you had in mind.

But it was very effective in the film.