In the spring of 1976, Barry Manilow took a rueful song about a marriage running on fumes to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. What nobody listening to the radio knew was that another version of the same song — recorded a year earlier by the Carpenters, the biggest-selling duo in America — had been shelved, its final lead vocal accidentally taped over, its surviving rough vocal buried inside a master reel where it would sit, lost, for nearly twenty years. “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again” is a song with two histories: the hit everybody heard, and the ghost recording that surfaced only after one of its singers was gone.
A Song Written Inside a Struggling Marriage
The writer was David Pomeranz, a young singer-songwriter signed to Arista Records, who composed the song during a period of stress in his own marriage — a lyric about a couple who have begun to wonder whether the love they remember can still be recovered, and about the exhausted, hopeful effort of trying. Pomeranz worked the song hard, rewriting it several times; he has noted that his own recording, Manilow’s and the Carpenters’ each preserve different verses, like three drafts of the same apology. He recorded his own version first, for his 1975 Arista album It’s in Every One of Us.
The partnership the song began did not end with it. Pomeranz became one of Manilow’s recurring outside writers, and half a decade later the two were back in the Top 20 together when Manilow took Pomeranz’s composition “The Old Songs,” written with Buddy Kaye, to the top of the Adult Contemporary chart in 1981 — a title that reads, in retrospect, like a summary of their whole trade. But it was the first collaboration that set the pattern: Pomeranz supplied the ache, Manilow supplied the architecture.
The song moved quickly through the small world of 1970s soft rock. Gene Pitney cut it in 1975. Manilow, Pomeranz’s labelmate at Arista, made it the title track of his third studio album, Tryin’ to Get the Feeling, released on October 1, 1975 — an album recorded at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia and Mediasound in New York, produced by Manilow with Ron Dante, that reached No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and went double platinum. For the title track, the horn and string arrangements were entrusted to Gerald Alters, and the song was placed second in the running order, immediately after the strutting opener “New York City Rhythm” — the album’s emotional keynote, the moment the showman set down his hat and confessed something. And across the continent at A&M Studios in Hollywood, the Carpenters were cutting the song too, for what would become their album Horizon.
The competition, if it can be called that, was between the two defining acts of American soft rock, and it underlined how thoroughly Pomeranz’s song fit its moment. The mid-1970s charts were full of records about holding a marriage together under fluorescent light — not young love, not heartbreak exactly, but the administrative fatigue of a long relationship and the effort of choosing it again. Pomeranz, writing from inside his own strained marriage, had caught that mood in a single image his title carried: love not as a possession but as a feeling that had to be actively, almost mechanically, recovered — tryin’, in the vernacular of the title, being very much the operative word.
The Version That Vanished
Richard Carpenter had every reason to want the song, and every reason, in the end, to leave it off. The Carpenters recorded “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again” during the Horizon sessions in 1975, but the album was already heavy with ballads, and the track was set aside as, in Richard’s phrase, “one too many ballads.” That might have been a postponement rather than a death sentence — until the tape itself betrayed them. When Richard went looking for the recording years later, he found that Karen’s final production vocal had been recorded over and was gone. The performance the Carpenters had intended the world to hear no longer existed.
What did exist, unknown to anyone, was a “work lead” — the scratch vocal Karen had sung while sight-reading the song, purely so the musicians could build the track around her. Work leads are not meant to survive, let alone be heard. This one had been left, by some filing accident, on the same master tape as “Only Yesterday,” one of the duo’s biggest hits. Richard only found it years afterward, while searching that reel for something else entirely. You can identify it as a work lead, he explained, by its anomalies — most famously the sound, at about 1:50 into the song, of Karen turning a page of the lyric sheet over as she reads and sings at the same time.
The discovery came too late for the obvious use. Richard had first gone hunting for the track while assembling Voice of the Heart, the first Carpenters album released after Karen’s death from anorexia in February 1983, and found the erased vocal instead. It was not until the 1990s, with the work lead finally in hand, that he judged the rough, sight-read performance strong enough to finish. He completed the production around it, and the Carpenters’ “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again” was released at last in 1994 on the anniversary collection Interpretations: A 25th Anniversary Celebration — issued as a single that December, almost twenty years after Karen had sung it, page-turn and all. Listeners who knew the story tended to find the flaw the most affecting moment on the record: a singer caught in the act of learning a song about trying to feel something again.
The Hit Everybody Heard
Manilow’s road was straighter, though not without its own edit. He released his version as a single in March 1976, with “Beautiful Music” on the B-side, and it became the second major hit drawn from the album after “I Write the Songs.” It debuted on the Hot 100 on March 20, 1976, climbed for fifteen weeks on the chart, and peaked at No. 10, while spending time at No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart — part of the mid-seventies run in which Manilow seemed to hold a permanent lease on that chart’s summit. His reading is a study in his trademark method: begin almost in a murmur, close to the microphone, and build, verse by verse and key change by key change, until a private marital worry fills an orchestral sky.
Even here, though, there is a missing piece. Manilow’s single omits the song’s original bridge, cut, he has explained, strictly for timing reasons; a longer alternate version, running nearly a minute more and restoring the bridge, eventually appeared on his retrospective box set The Complete Collection and Then Some… He has said he tries to reinstate the bridge when he performs the song live — so the hit single, the album-era artifact most people know, is itself a slightly abridged edition of the song Pomeranz wrote. And in the strangest of the song’s symmetries, the Carpenters’ recovered version kept what the hit discarded: Karen’s work lead sings the song complete, original bridge included, so that the rough draft preserves the full text and the polished hit does not.
There is one more turn of the screw. Horizon, the album that had no room for the song, was itself a triumph — a platinum seller containing the duo’s No. 1 cover of “Please Mr. Postman” and the Top 5 hit “Only Yesterday,” the very recording whose master reel would one day give up its secret. Richard Carpenter’s judgment in 1975 was, by any commercial measure, correct: the album did not need another ballad. The loss was not artistic but archival, and it took an accident of tape storage — a scratch vocal filed against a hit single — to correct it. Popular music history usually turns on what artists decided. This one turned on where an engineer happened to leave a reel.
Three Verses, Three Endings
That is the peculiar richness of this song’s story: it exists as a small cluster of versions, each missing something. Pomeranz rewrote it as he went, so the writer’s own album, Manilow’s hit and the Carpenters’ recovered take each sing different verses — the same failing relationship described from slightly different points along its decline. One version was shortened for radio. One was erased and replaced by a rehearsal. One was sung by its writer about his own marriage and heard by almost no one.
What survives intact is the feeling the title describes, which turned out to describe the song’s own fate with uncomfortable precision. Manilow’s recording kept trying, week after week, until it reached the Top 10. The Carpenters’ recording quite literally had to wait — through a shelving, an erasure, a death and a decade of misfiled tape — for someone to get the feeling back. When audiences finally heard Karen Carpenter’s page turn at 1:50, they were not hearing an outtake. They were hearing the song’s whole story in a single sound: love, and music, recovered from the place where lost things wait to be found.