This 1971 Hit By Neil Diamond Is His Most Personal Song By Far

In 1970, Neil Diamond sat in his dressing room after what he thought was a terrible screen audition for a biopic about the groundbreaking comedian Lenny Bruce. That day, he strummed his guitar, feeling depressed and lost. He'd recently left his hometown of New York City for Los Angeles, but through the darkness the glimmerings of a new song, his most personal, began to emerge. But "I Am... I Said" didn't come quickly like some of his other hits. It took him almost four months and numerous therapy sessions to get the song right.

The single appeared on Diamond's 1971 album "Stones," which also contained the underrated song "Crunchy Granola Suite." "I Am... I Said" eventually reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the charts for 14 weeks. It also did well internationally, including reaching No. 1 in Canada. With "I Am... I Said," the singer-songwriter managed to turn his inner turmoil and feelings of displacement into a beloved classic.

Neil Diamond was born in Brooklyn in 1941 and later attended New York University for pre-med on a fencing scholarship — just part of the untold truth of Diamond — before quitting to become a songwriter. In 1968, Diamond left his home on the East Coast and moved to Los Angeles, and by 1970 was newly married, working with MCA, and already had a No. 1 hit under his belt. Yet Diamond felt he didn't fit in the LA scene. "I knew that I was out of it," Diamond told Rolling Stone in 1976. "But I could never relate being serious about my work and hanging out with people." 

In the pre-chorus for "I Am... I Said," Diamond openly reveals his feeling of being set adrift without a true home: "Well, I'm New York City born and raised / But nowadays, I'm lost between two shores / LA's fine, but it ain't home / New York's home, but it ain't mine no more." Even after decades of living in California, Diamond retained that feeling. "I've lived here for over 40 years, brought up my kids here," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. "But I never have a sense of being at home anywhere I go, for some reason. I have no home, and yet every place is my home." It was partly that sense of disconnection in a new city that Diamond drew inspiration from to craft "I Am.. I Said."

In 1970, Neil Diamond was wanting to get into acting when a potential starring role in a biopic about Lenny Bruce came his way. Diamond, excited by the prospect, dove deeply into the project, but Bruce's salty language and his subject matter unlocked something in Diamond that he didn't like. Then, right before his audition, the filmmakers introduced Diamond to Bruce's mother, Sally Marr. Bruce had tragically died of a drug overdose in 1966, just four years before Diamond was auditioning for the role of Bruce and interacting with Marr. The meeting rattled him.

Diamond believed he blew the audition, a feeling that seeped into "I Am... I Said." "It was very personal, all about self-doubt," Diamond told the Sunday Telegraph in 1992. "It was really saying, 'God, I really am nothing.'" Diamond did not get the part, and the project ended up being scrapped anyway. Ultimately, Diamond's soul-searching while writing "I Am... I Said" proved to be not only therapeutic, but also birthed a very personal, but universally relatable, classic.