Every hitmaker has one: the song that was not the biggest, not the most played, not the one the audience came for — the one the singer privately loves best. For Barry Manilow, by his own testimony, it is “Even Now.” In his autobiography Sweet Life, Manilow called the 1978 title track “one of my personal favorites, which never fails to move me,” and tied it to his gratitude for his collaboration with lyricist Marty Panzer. Judged purely by its pop peak — No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 — it looks like a modest entry in a catalogue of smashes. Judged by what it did on the chart it was built for, and by the company it keeps, it is something else: the emotional centerpiece of the most successful album of Manilow’s career, and a No. 1 record that has outlasted flashier hits in his own affections and in his concerts.
The Panzer Partnership
Manilow wrote the music; the words are by Marty Panzer, his oldest songwriting collaborator, a partner from the lean years before fame whose lyrics run through Manilow’s career from “New York City Rhythm” onward. Their division of labor was the classic one — Panzer’s words, Manilow’s melodies — and “Even Now” is perhaps its most exposed product. According to Wesley Hyatt’s Billboard Book of #1 Adult Contemporary Hits, the lyric grew from Panzer’s own remorse: it describes a man who left a woman with whom he had a great relationship, trading her for what looked like a better life with someone else, against his own instincts — and who discovers that success and a new love have not quietened the memory at all. Even now, with someone else who cares waiting at home, he thinks about her as he climbs the stairs. The song’s power is in that arrangement of facts: nothing is wrong, and nothing is right.
Manilow and Ron Dante produced the track, recorded for the album at A&M Studios in Hollywood, with orchestration by Artie Butler. It is built in B major at a slow, processional tempo, Manilow’s vocal ranging wide, and it ends with the final chorus lifted into C major — the classic Manilow modulation, here deployed not as showmanship but as a kind of involuntary surge, the feeling coming back one more time whether the singer wants it or not.
The lyric’s construction is worth noticing, because it refuses the usual shape of a lost-love song. The narrator is not alone, not single, not free to act: the other woman is present in the song only as an absence, while the woman he actually has is present as a kindness he cannot repay in kind. Panzer gives him no villain and no exit — only the staircase, the hour, and the knowledge that memory has seniority over gratitude. That is why the record’s slow tempo matters. At sixty-six beats per minute there is nowhere for the singer to hide; each chorus arrives like a tide the lyric has already told us cannot be turned. Manilow sings it without his usual theatrical armour, and the restraint is the performance: a man being honest at the exact volume of a confession.
The Album That Carried It
“Even Now” was the title track of Manilow’s fifth studio album, Even Now, released in early 1978, and the album around it was a phenomenon. It peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in April 1978, was certified triple platinum, and at the 21st Annual Grammy Awards it was nominated for Album of the Year, losing to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack — no dishonor in the year of disco’s imperial phase. Its singles run was extraordinary even by Manilow’s standards: four hit singles across 1978 and into 1979, beginning with his lush reading of “Can’t Smile Without You,” continuing through “Even Now,” the story-song spectacular “Copacabana (At the Copa),” and Richard Kerr’s “Somewhere in the Night,” which reached the Top 10 in early 1979 after Manilow’s Foul Play soundtrack single “Ready to Take a Chance Again” had charted in between.
Released as the album’s second single in April 1978, with “I Was a Fool (To Let You Go)” on the B-side, “Even Now” had the misfortune and the protection of that sequence: surrounded by hits, it was neither pushed as the album’s spearhead nor left to fend for itself. The trade press heard its quality clearly. Billboard called it “one of Manilow’s classiest efforts.” Cash Box wrote that “Barry reaches shivering moments.” Record World described “an emotional, sentimental ballad in [Manilow’s] trademark style.”
Two Charts, Two Verdicts
The pop market gave it a respectable but unspectacular ride: a Hot 100 peak of No. 19 in June 1978, No. 17 on the Cash Box Top 100, and Top 20 placings in Canada and New Zealand. On the chart that measured Manilow’s true constituency, the verdict was emphatic. “Even Now” became his ninth song to reach No. 1 on Billboard‘s easy listening chart — the Adult Contemporary ranking — spending three weeks at the top beginning May 27, 1978. In an era when adult contemporary radio was becoming a commercial empire of its own, Manilow was its defining artist, and “Even Now” is close to a definition of the form: confession without scandal, orchestration without clutter, a melody engineered to carry a lyric about the one subject his audience never tired of — the past’s refusal to stay past.
The scale of that dominion is easy to forget now. Across his career Manilow placed 51 singles in the Top 40 of the Adult Contemporary chart, 13 of them at No. 1 — a record of format ownership closer to a franchise than a hit streak. The AC audience was not the teenage pop market; it was the generation that had grown up with him, buying albums, attending the arena shows and living inside exactly the emotional situations Panzer wrote about. A song in which a settled man admits that settlement has not cured him was not a downbeat curiosity to that audience. It was a dispatch from their own lives, arriving on the chart they actually listened to, and they kept it at No. 1 for three weeks while the pop chart — busy that spring with the Saturday Night Fever juggernaut and the first stirrings of the disco summer — let it stop at No. 19.
Context flatters the album, too. Even Now arrived at the one moment when Manilow’s commercial machine and his critical standing briefly overlapped: the Album of the Year nomination placed him in the Grammy conversation alongside the Saturday Night Fever phenomenon, and the LP’s four-single run across a full calendar year made it less a record than a season. The title track was the run’s quiet middle — no dance beat, no novelty, no film tie-in — and its success demonstrated that the Manilow audience would follow him to the least commercial material on the album, provided it was the most honest.
There is a quiet irony in the record’s chart biography. The album’s extrovert songs did the spectacular work: “Copacabana” became a pop-cultural landmark, “Can’t Smile Without You” a standard. The title track, a song about the impossibility of leaving anything behind, was the one that modestly stepped aside on the pop chart while quietly ruling the audience that actually bought Manilow albums by the million.
The Song That Stayed
Unlike “Copacabana” or “Can’t Smile Without You,” “Even Now” has never really been colonised by other singers; it remains stubbornly Manilow’s, a song other vocalists seem to recognise as a diary entry rather than a standard. Its afterlife has run instead through his own catalogue — a fixture of his hits compilations and of the ballad sequences in his concerts, where it is routinely placed not among the novelties but in the emotional centre of the show, the point at which the evening stops being a revue and becomes a reckoning.
Time has sided with the singer’s judgment. In the decades since, “Even Now” has remained a fixture of Manilow’s stage shows, sung by an artist who is himself now an emblem of pop’s long memory, still climbing those stairs in front of audiences who have grown old alongside the song’s dilemma. The dilemma has not dated, because it was never really about 1978. It is about the discovery — arriving, typically, somewhere in mid-life and mid-success — that moving on is an achievement of logistics rather than of the heart.
That is why the song had to be the title track. Even Now the album is remembered for its hits, but “Even Now” the song is the album’s thesis stated in three and a half minutes: everything in this man’s glittering present is shadowed by one absence. Manilow said it never fails to move him. Nearly fifty years on, for the audience that made it a No. 1 record on the chart that mattered to them, it never stopped — the rare hit whose title turned out to be a prophecy of its own shelf life.