A teenage heartbreak that became a lifelong melody.
Before Neil Diamond wrote love songs for millions, he wrote one he never sent. In the late 1950s, as a Brooklyn teenager, he fell deeply in love with his high school sweetheart, Anita. They would sit together after class, sharing dreams and milkshakes, and she was the first to tell him, “You have a songwriter’s heart.”
But when her family suddenly moved away to California, Neil never got the chance to say goodbye. For weeks, he carried a folded letter in his jacket pocket — words of love, fear, and promise. He couldn’t bring himself to mail it. “I thought I’d look foolish,” he later admitted. “So I put it away… but the feeling stayed.”
That unsent letter became the seed for “Solitary Man,” the song that would define his career. In its melancholy lyrics, listeners can still hear the echo of that young man who lost his chance to say what he truly felt.
Decades later, Neil would say in an interview: “Every song I wrote after that was, in some way, me trying to finish that letter.”
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