1984 · Behind the Songs
An unfinished lyric from a dying legend, finished eight years later.
Johnny Mercer, one of America’s great lyricists, spent his final year dying of brain cancer. In that time he grew fond of Barry Manilow — partly, the story goes, because Manilow’s first hit, “Mandy,” happened to be the nickname of Mercer’s daughter Amanda. Mercer died in 1976 with drawers full of unfinished lyrics. His widow, Ginger Mehan Mercer, later arranged for a selection of those fragments to be given to Manilow, in the hope that he could develop them into complete songs. One of them was a seasonal lyric called “When October Goes.”
Manilow wrote a melody for Mercer’s words and made the song the centerpiece of his 1984 album 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe, producing the session himself for Arista. Released as a single with “Paradise Cafe” on the flip side, it reached number 6 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart — a quiet hit built on patience rather than promotion. Jazz and cabaret singers including Rosemary Clooney and Nancy Wilson later recorded it, and it has settled into the repertoire as a modern autumn standard: proof that a song can take eight years to finish and still arrive on time.