| "I Am...I Said" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by Neil Diamond | ||||
| B-side | "Done Too Soon" | |||
| Released | March 1971 | |||
| Format | 7" 45 RPM | |||
| Genre | Pop/Rock | |||
| Length | 3:32 | |||
| Label | Uni | |||
| Writer(s) | Neil Diamond | |||
| Neil Diamond singles chronology | ||||
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"I Am...I Said" is a song written and recorded by Neil Diamond. Released as a single in March 1971,[1] 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.[2][3] It fared similarly across the Atlantic, reaching number 4 on the UK pop singles chart as well.[4]
"I Am...I Said" took Diamond four months to compose.[3] One of his most intensely personal efforts, it depicts the singer lost between two worlds:
Verses start quietly in a low vocal range, half sung and half spoken, with a soft rock guitar and light strings backing. By the chorus climaxes, the vocals are much louder and higher in pitch, with horns, heavier drums and more strings joining in, but the singer even more uncertain:
"I Am...I Said" was later included on Diamond's November 1971 album Stones. The single version leads off the LP, while a reprise of the song, taken from midway to a variant ending with Diamond exclaiming "I am!", concludes.[5]
Critical opinion on "I Am...I Said" has generally been good, with Rolling Stone calling its lyric excellent in a 1972 review,[5] while The New Yorker used it to exemplify Diamond's songwriting opaqueness in a 2006 retrospective.[6] A 2008 Diamond profile in The Daily Telegraph simply referred to the song's "raging existential angst,"[7] and Allmusic calls it "an impassioned statement of emotional turmoil ... very much in tune with the confessional singer/songwriter movement of the time."[1]
The song garnered Diamond his first Grammy Awards nomination, for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male.[1]
"I Am...I Said" has been included in live versions on Diamond's Hot August Night (from 1972, in a performance that Rolling Stone would later label "fantastically overwrought"[8]) and The Greatest Hits: 1966-1992 (from 1992), as well as in various compilations.
Brooke White performed the song on American Idol's seventh season during its Neil Diamond week,[9] changing the lyric to replace New York City with her home state of Arizona.[9] Among the foreign versions are the Italian language "La casa degli angeli" ("House of the angels"), performed by Caterina Caselli in the original 1971.[10] and by Dutchman Jan Rot on his 2008 album Hallelujah as "Zeg God... zeg ik", taking the title as someone who curses, while the Jewish word for God is meaning 'I am'. The band Killdozer also covered the song on their 1989 album Twelve Point Buck.
In May 2011 Diamond revealed on the Irish television chat show 'The Late Late Show' that he had written the song in response to the nervousness he felt while auditioning for the part of Lenny Bruce in 1974 biographical film of the same name.