I Am I Said
I want to add a new song to my song HoF... and it is "I Am... I Said" by Neil Diamond
This is a song that Linda really likes from a performer that Linda really likes. Me, not so much... but everything is not all about me, is it? Linda is very important in my life, so consequently this is a song that is worthy of my list.
We went down to Manchester to see Neil Diamond several years ago, and Linda's seen him a few other times... including in Canada... and including when Charles and Diana were in attendance.
Anyway, this is one of Neil Diamond's big signature songs.
When Linda was young, she says, she felt like she was the only one who really understood Neil when he sang this song.
I've got a few things here from Wikipedia:
Released as a single on March 15, 1971, it was quite successful, at first slowly climbing the charts, then more quickly rising to number 4 on the U.S. pop singles chart by May 1971. It fared similarly across the Atlantic, reaching number 4 on the UK pop singles chart as well.
One of his most intensely personal efforts, Neil Diamond told Mojo magazine July 2008 that this song came from a time he spent in therapy in Los Angeles. He said: It was consciously an attempt on my part to express what my dreams were about, what my aspirations were about and what I was about. And without any question, it came from my sessions with the analyst.
Critical opinion on "I Am... I Said" has generally been good, with Rolling Stone calling its lyric excellent in a 1972 review, while The New Yorker used it to exemplify Diamond's songwriting opaqueness in a 2006 retrospective. A 2008 Diamond profile in The Daily Telegraph simply referred to the song's "raging existential angst," and Allmusic calls it "an impassioned statement of emotional turmoil... very much in tune with the confessional singer/songwriter movement of the time."
The song garnered Diamond his first Grammy Awards nomination, for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male.