For 14 months, Neil Diamond disappeared into his studio.
This wasn’t a vacation, a publicity stunt, or an attempt to escape the demands of being a famous singer. Diamond was working from dawn until dark, six or seven days a week, trying to dig deeper into his writing than he ever had before. He later described the period as difficult, saying he was trying to reach into his ability, his soul, and his life and come out with songs that revealed something new.
The result would become 12 Songs.
At first, however, Diamond didn’t know exactly what he was making. He was accustomed to writing songs the way he always had: sitting with an instrument, developing an idea, and concentrating on the song itself. He wasn’t necessarily imagining the finished record while he wrote it.
Then Rick Rubin entered the picture.
Rubin had already become famous for producing artists across wildly different genres, but his work with Johnny Cash had caught Diamond’s attention. When the two finally began working together, Rubin had a very specific idea: he wanted a stripped-down record in which Diamond’s voice and songwriting were placed front and center.
And there was one part of Rubin’s plan Diamond absolutely hated.
Rubin wanted him to play guitar while singing.
Diamond hadn’t done that on record in decades. He complained about it repeatedly and initially resisted the producer’s insistence. But Rubin refused to back down. Eventually, after several recording sessions, Diamond began hearing something he hadn’t heard in his own music for years.
Rubin’s approach was exposing another side of him.
The arrangements were deliberately sparse. Instead of surrounding Diamond with layers of production, Rubin wanted the songs to breathe. The emphasis was on the voice, the guitar, the words, and the emotional character of the performances.
That changed the experience for Diamond.
He later explained that the actual creation of the record in the studio was the most “eye-opening” part of the entire process. Rubin wasn’t simply recording the songs Diamond had written; he was challenging him to reconsider how those songs should sound once they left the page.
For an artist who had already spent decades making records, that was a remarkable realization.
Diamond wasn’t a newcomer searching for his sound. He had already written “Sweet Caroline,” “Cracklin’ Rosie,” “I Am… I Said,” and countless other songs. He had sold millions of records and built an enormous career. Yet suddenly, in a studio with a producer from a completely different musical generation, he was being pushed into territory that felt unfamiliar again.
And that discomfort became part of the breakthrough.
12 Songs was released in 2005, marking an important late-career turn for Diamond. The record’s intimate acoustic approach was a sharp contrast to some of the more heavily produced work associated with his earlier career. The collaboration also gave listeners a different version of an artist they thought they already knew.
But perhaps the biggest change happened inside the studio.
Diamond discovered that a song didn’t necessarily become more powerful because more was added to it. Sometimes the opposite was true. Sometimes taking things away could reveal something that had been buried underneath years of arrangements, expectations, and studio habits.
That lesson stayed with him.
The 14 months of writing had begun as an intense attempt to find better songs. Working with Rubin turned the process into something else: an examination of how Diamond himself sounded when the familiar machinery was stripped away.
He entered the studio believing he already knew how his songs should be recorded.
He left having learned to hear them differently.
And for an artist who had spent nearly four decades making records, that may have been the most unexpected discovery of all: sometimes the best way to find a new sound is to go back and listen to yourself as if you’ve never heard the song before.