It is one of the great double lives in pop. “Daydream Believer” was a No. 1 single for the Monkees in 1967 — four weeks atop the Hot 100, sung by a telegenic Davy Jones who later admitted he’d been annoyed through the whole session. Twelve years later, Anne Murray picked the song up, slowed it down, took the bounce out of it, and turned it into something else entirely: a wistful country-pop ballad that reached No. 12 on the Hot 100, No. 3 on the country chart, and No. 1 on adult contemporary — her eighth chart-topper on that format. Same song, same chorus, wholly different emotion. The distance between the two records is a small history of how pop grew up.
A Suburbia Song Nobody Wanted
John Stewart wrote “Daydream Believer” shortly before leaving the Kingston Trio, as the third song in a trilogy about suburban life. He recalled the moment plainly: “I remember going to bed thinking, ‘What a wasted day – all I’ve done is daydream.’ And from there I wrote the whole song. I never thought it was one of my best songs. Not at all.” The market initially agreed with his modesty. The song was turned down by We Five and by Spanky and Our Gang before a piece of luck intervened: at a party at Hoyt Axton’s home in Laurel Canyon, producer Chip Douglas mentioned he was now producing the Monkees and asked whether Stewart had anything that might suit them. Stewart offered “Daydream Believer.”
Stewart’s song was subtler than its bubblegum reputation suggests. It opens in the small hours of a working life — a man who could “hide ‘neath the wings of the bluebird as she sings,” because “the six-o’clock alarm would never ring” — and beneath the singalong chorus sits a quietly curdling marriage: a “daydream believer and a homecoming queen” whose union, as Variety later put it, focuses on the endgame of a comfy but increasingly distant relationship, driven more by money than romance. It was a folk singer’s song wearing a pop costume, which may be why it kept finding new lives long after the costume went out of style. Stewart himself never disowned it; he reclaimed it, recording his own version in 1971 for The Lonesome Picker Rides Again — slower, wearier, delivered almost as a parody of the Monkees’ hit and pointedly closer to the song he had written than to the one that had made him rich. For the rest of his career he introduced it on stage with the air of a man who had made his peace with being famous for the wrong version of his own song — and the royalties, as he admitted, made the peace considerably easier to keep.
The Reluctant Masterpiece
The Monkees recorded the song at RCA Victor’s Hollywood studio in June and August 1967, with Douglas producing — at the very moment the group was fighting its famous battle for artistic credibility, having only just won the right to play their own instruments on record. All four Monkees appear on the track: Peter Tork devised the famous piano introduction, Michael Nesmith played guitar, Micky Dolenz sang harmony, and Davy Jones took the lead, while jazz trumpeter Shorty Rogers built the orchestral arrangement around them. Jones, by his own later account, was “pissed off” recording it, worn down by take after take — and thought he could hear the irritation in his own vocal. RCA, meanwhile, objected to a word in Stewart’s lyric: where Stewart wrote “Now you know how funky I can be,” the label insisted on “happy,” fearing one period slang meaning of funky. Stewart objected that the change reversed the line’s sense, then relented, later dryly noting that the song could be a hit. Posterity has sided with everyone at once: the “happy” version is the standard, and critics writing decades later — Tom Breihan devoted a chapter of Stereogum‘s “The Number Ones” to it — still marvel at how the baroque arrangement smuggles psychedelic-era sophistication into a teen single.
According to Fred Bronson’s The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, “Daydream Believer” was nearly a B-side — scheduled to back a Michael Nesmith-sung single, “Love Is Only Sleeping,” until a week before release, when it emerged that the European masters of the A-side weren’t ready while “Daydream Believer” was. The switch was made, “Goin’ Down” became the flip, and the almost-B-side reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 in December 1967 and stayed four weeks. It also topped the Cash Box chart and the Canadian RPM chart, hit No. 1 in Ireland and New Zealand and No. 5 in Britain, sold a million copies in the United States, and became the Monkees’ third — and last — American No. 1. When it was held over for the 1968 album The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees, it became the signature track of the group’s final classic LP. The trade press had sensed it immediately: Billboard called it a “well written easy beat rhythm ballad” with a “clever opening,” and Cash Box praised an arrangement that grew “from a simple piano opening to a compelling ensemble.” Stewart got the last word on its value in 2006: the proceeds, he said, “kept me alive for all these years.”
Anne Murray Slows It Down
By 1979, Anne Murray was the most reliable crossover artist in North America, and the album that carried her version, I’ll Always Love You, was itself a major success — released in October 1979, it reached No. 4 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, No. 24 on the Billboard 200, and No. 1 on Canada’s RPM country albums chart, and was certified platinum. It was already home to her No. 1 “Broken Hearted Me” when Murray turned to the pop of her youth for its second single.
Her “Daydream Believer,” produced by Jim Ed Norman and recorded at Eastern Sound in Toronto, is a study in reinterpretation. Where the Monkees’ record runs three minutes of sprinting cheer, hers clocks in at two minutes twenty-six seconds and still feels slower: the tempo relaxes, the piano figure turns reflective, and Murray’s low, even contralto finds the melancholy Stewart had buried under the Monkees’ sunshine. She doesn’t change the song’s sunny chorus, but she changes its tense — the homecoming queen, in her reading, sounds like a woman looking back across a marriage rather than a girl being serenaded at its start. It is the difference between a song about daydreaming and a song about having daydreamed.
Released as a single in December 1979, backed with “Do You Think of Me?,” Murray’s version climbed to No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 — peaking on February 23, 1980, after a seventeen-week run — reached No. 21 in Cash Box, No. 3 on the Hot Country Songs chart, and No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart: remarkably, her eighth No. 1 on that format. In Canada it topped both the RPM country and adult contemporary charts, and it finished 1980 ranked No. 61 on Billboard‘s year-end pop singles list. Capitol then folded it into Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits that September, where it sat in the track listing between “Broken Hearted Me” and the brand-new “Could I Have This Dance” — the Monkees cover keeping company with the biggest originals of her career, entirely on merit. A song written by a departing Kingston Trio folk singer had now been a hit for a manufactured TV band and a Canadian country-pop institution, in two different genres, in two different decades — and it had topped the adult contemporary chart for good measure, the format that had barely existed when Jones first sang it.
The Song That Wouldn’t Retire
The afterlife kept compounding. The Monkees’ original has continued to accumulate honors in the streaming era, including a Platinum certification in Britain for 600,000 units. In 1986, amid the Monkees’ reunion-tour success, Arista remixed the original with heavier drums and took it back to No. 79 on the Hot 100. In 2000, the song gave its title to the TV biopic Daydream Believers: The Monkees’ Story. And in 2007, Murray herself returned to it one more time, re-recording it as a duet with Nelly Furtado for Anne Murray Duets: Friends & Legends — a pairing that neatly bridged the song’s two homelands of Canadian pop. When Davy Jones died in 2012, “Daydream Believer” was the song the obituaries reached for: the record he resented making had become the sound of him forever.
That durability is the real story. Most hits are welded to their moment; this one has been re-welded at least three times — as folk song, as bubblegum coronation, as adult ballad — without breaking. Murray’s version is the proof of the song’s depth: strip away the Monkees’ grin and the chorus still stands, because underneath it there was always a real song, written by a man who thought he’d wasted a day. He hadn’t. He’d written the rare standard that could survive being sung by almost anyone — including, definitively, Anne Murray.