Page One

"Hi Everybody.

This is Neil Diamond and I'm pleased and I'm proud and I'm excited to welcome you to an insiders view of one of the most magical recording sessions that I have had the pleasure of performing at.

"The music, the orchestrations, the conductor... Mr. Elmer Bernstein. These went to make it very very special for me, and fortunately we had lots of cameras going on. You can't see them for the most part, but they told the story of how this music is put down on tape and captured, hopefully, for history.

"It was a new experience for me, and I hope you can sense the excitement and the nerves as well that goes on in making an album for your pleasure.

Thank You."

	You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh; The fundamental things apply, As time goes by.
And when two lovers woo, they still say, "I love you," On that you can rely; No matter what the future brings, As times goes by.
	Moonlight and love songs never out of date, Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate; Woman needs man and man must have his mate, That no one can deny.
It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, A case of do or die! The world will always welcome lovers, As time goes by.

"I must have seen Casablanca a dozen times...maybe two dozen times. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. And especially I like the part where Humphrey Bogart tells the piano player to 'play it again.'

"And there was something about this archetypical tough-guy movie guy asking the piano player to play something so sensitive. That it gave me an insight into the character much more than anything that was involved in dialogue or the relationship.

"It told me more about that character, just by that request of music, than I got in pages and pages of script."

"The process was, first of all, for the orchestra to read -- they sight read the music -- to sight read the arrangements, the various arrangements.

"During the process of running them down (listening to the orchestra play them) sometimes the arranger would find that he'd written a wrong note or didn't like something that he had done as well as something else. There was very little of that, actually. We had very very few changes."

"Most often Neil would come out or I'd ask him to come out on to the podium while I was running the the songs so he could hear the arrangement and sort of sing to it...practice singing to it."

"I was surprised by a lot of the things that we did in the first couple of days of recording because I had no idea that the chemistry of the orchestra and the voice and the conductor would all really work. It's all in the imagination until you actually do it. So to me that was the nice thing...seeing that it could come together beautifully. I think it did.
	"I was a little nervous at the beginning...the first day or so, but when you are working with really tremendously talented people they'll help you through these little scrapes that you get into."