5 June 1971
Anyone who writes ‘I’m A Believer’ can’t be all bad. Therefore, to say that every Neil Diamond song is knuckle-gnawingly dreadful would be incorrect. It’s the other 99.9 percent of them that’s the problem: his gauche, self-satisfied lyrics that amount to the wrong-headed knowingness of a parish priest telling a class of teens not to be injecting pot; his folksy yet weirdly declamatory singing style, as if he were gleefully confiding to you in a noisy pub that he had just won a bet by soiling himself; his apparent artistic conviction that the Palace of Wisdom lies at the end of the Road of Schmaltz. Given his massive popularity in Ireland down the years, I’m surprised that ‘I Am… I Said’ is Neil Diamond’s only Irish number one. It’s a pleasant surprise.
This dreary ballad doesn’t even have the sing-along, wave-along consolation of his more up-tempo numbers like ‘Sweet Caroline’, once permissible in polite society but now forever mired in association with England football fans and Dustin. For all its straining efforts at confessional introspection, ‘I Am… I Said’ is basically Neil’s go at writing a ‘Homeward Bound’, even down to following Paul Simon’s habit of cramming too many words into a line. His sincerity here just makes those overwrought lyrics all the more embarrassing; you probably know the chorus clunker about the chair, but that second verse when Neil launches into “Did you ever read about a frog / Who dreamed of being a king…” is where I really start chewing the carpet. Neil’s soul-baring singer-songer aspirations on ‘I Am… I Said’ are fatally scuttled by his having already sold that soul to cabaret kitsch. Cogito ergo gruesome.
