Some songs don’t just remind us of a time. They become the time.
There are certain songs that seem to arrive in your life before you are old enough to understand why they matter. They simply become part of the soundtrack, quietly attaching themselves to places, people, seasons and versions of yourself that you will only understand much later. For me, Neil Diamond has always been one of those voices.
I discovered him as a little girl in the 1970s, when summers spent in the United States came with their own soundtrack. There was Coming to America, there was Forever in Blue Jeans, and there was that unmistakable Neil Diamond voice drifting through radios, cars and wherever music happened to be playing. I knew nothing about songwriting, record sales or musical history. I simply knew that Neil Diamond belonged to summer.
Those American summers became their own little world, and his songs became part of the scenery. They belonged to long drives, warm evenings and that peculiar feeling of being somewhere completely different from home. At that age, music was rarely something you analysed. You heard it, you liked it, and somehow it lodged itself permanently in your memory.
Then came September Morn.
Released in 1979 as the title track of Diamond’s album of the same name, the song was co-written with celebrated French singer and songwriter Gilbert Bécaud, who had also recorded a French version, C’est en septembre. The song tells the story of two people meeting again after time and distance have changed them, looking back at a love that still has the power to bring the past vividly into the present.
I didn’t know any of that when I first heard it. What I knew was that September always felt like a beginning.
September meant a new school year and, sometimes, a completely new school. It meant new teachers, new classrooms, new faces and the strange mixture of excitement and dread that comes with walking into a place where nobody knows you yet. In my younger years, it could also mean saying goodbye to a summer romance that had seemed terribly important in June and somehow become much more complicated by August.
September was change. It was the month when one version of life ended and another began, which is probably why September Morn followed me so closely through the years. The song itself looks backwards, bringing two people together again and allowing them to remember who they once were, while the September morning becomes a kind of doorway between past and present. For me, however, September was never simply about looking back. It was also about looking forward.
Every September offered the possibility of a reset: a new school, a new city, new people, a new chapter and sometimes even a new version of myself. The funny thing about growing older is that you eventually realise how many times you have lived through your own September mornings. The details change, the scenery changes, the people beside you change, and you change along with them, yet there is something about the beginning of September that still carries that peculiar sense of possibility.
Perhaps that is why I have always been more sentimental about September than December. January gets all the attention for new beginnings, with its resolutions and empty calendars, but January is still winter. September has just come through summer with its hair slightly dishevelled and its suitcase full of memories, standing at the door and asking, “Right. What’s next?”
Then there is Sweet Caroline.
For years, I understood the song as another Neil Diamond classic. I knew the words, I knew the melody, and I knew that it was impossible to hear that opening without eventually joining in. What I did not understand was why, whenever I encountered it in the United States, it seemed to have acquired an entirely different life.
Suddenly, Neil Diamond was not simply Neil Diamond. He was baseball, and more specifically, the Boston Red Sox.
The story is wonderfully ordinary. In 1997, Amy Tobey, an employee responsible for music at Fenway Park, played Sweet Caroline during a game because someone she knew had recently had a baby named Caroline. The song was subsequently played occasionally, but in 2002 Red Sox executive Charles Steinberg decided it should become a regular part of the game after hearing how enthusiastically the crowd was singing along. It eventually became the famous eighth-inning singalong that Red Sox fans know today.
I had spent decades thinking of Neil Diamond as part of the soundtrack of my childhood and summers, while an entire sporting culture had apparently adopted one of his songs and turned it into a ritual. How did nobody tell me?
The transformation went even further. Following the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Sweet Caroline became an emotional symbol for Boston, with Diamond making a surprise appearance at Fenway Park on April 20 to lead the crowd himself. The song subsequently spread far beyond baseball and into other sporting environments, becoming one of those melodies capable of turning an entire stadium into one very large, very enthusiastic choir.
It crossed the Atlantic and became firmly associated with football crowds in Britain. Sweet Caroline became an unofficial anthem for England supporters during Euro 2020 and continued to follow the team into major tournaments. At this year’s World Cup, FIFA included it among the familiar stadium favourites, although England’s newer post-match anthem became Oasis’s Wonderwall. Even the Prince of Wales has joined the phenomenon. Earlier this year, Prince William, a lifelong Aston Villa supporter, was filmed singing Sweet Caroline enthusiastically with the crowd at Villa Park after Aston Villa reached the Europa League final. Seeing a future king belting out Neil Diamond with thousands of football fans is perhaps the ultimate proof that this song has travelled a very long way from its original home.
I find this oddly wonderful because a song that began as a recording in 1969 somehow became part of baseball culture decades later, crossed an ocean, found a home in football stadiums and became something larger than the artist who recorded it. Perhaps that is what music does at its best. We think we own the songs because they live in our memories, but eventually they develop lives of their own.
September Morn belongs to my September memories: new beginnings, endings, school years, summer romances, reinvention and all those little moments when life quietly closes one door and opens another. Sweet Caroline belongs to something much bigger now. It belongs to stadiums, baseball fans, football fans, celebrations and people who may never have owned a Neil Diamond album.
Both songs have travelled far beyond the circumstances in which I first encountered them. So has their listener.
The little girl who discovered Neil Diamond during those American summers could never have imagined how many summers, Septembers, beginnings and endings would follow. She certainly could not have imagined that one day she would be sitting somewhere in Europe, looking back across decades of life and realising that a song about a September morning had become a kind of personal time machine.
That is the peculiar gift of getting older. We collect versions of ourselves without necessarily realising we are doing it. The child, the teenager, the young woman, the woman who left one country for another, the woman who started again, the woman who kept going and the woman sitting here now are all still somewhere inside the soundtrack.
September is still September. Summer ends, the air changes and the calendar turns another page. Something finishes, something begins, and somewhere in the background a familiar song starts playing.
I suppose that is why September still gets me. After all these years, after all the places, people, beginnings, endings and reinventions, a September morning can still make me feel that way.
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