Sing along with the chorus in your head and you will notice something odd: the title of “Weekend in New England” never actually appears in the song. There is no weekend in the lyrics, and the words “New England” surface only once, tucked into the first line of the second verse. Yet in the winter of 1976–77, American radio could not get enough of Barry Manilow’s wistful ballad about a brief seaside romance already receding into memory. It climbed to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and it has remained one of the signature songs of Manilow’s career — a song he very nearly never recorded, because the most powerful man at his record label first sent it back to its writer with instructions to fix the verses.
A B-Side in Search of a Singer
The song began with Randy Edelman, a conservatory-trained composer who had taken an unlikely route through the music business. After studying piano and composition at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Edelman worked as an arranger at James Brown’s King Records in Cincinnati, then moved to New York, where he became a staff writer at CBS Records and played piano in Broadway pit orchestras. By the mid-1970s he was recording his own albums as a singer-songwriter, literate and fatalistically romantic in style, and building a following in Britain.
For his 1975 album Farewell Fairbanks, Edelman recorded a gentle, waltzing ballad called “A Weekend in New England.” Even its time signature argued against hit potential: as Edelman himself later recalled, the song was written in 3/4 waltz time, “which no one seemed to think would work” — one more reason, in an industry calibrated to the backbeat, for the tune to be filed away as an album piece. It was not treated as a prize asset. It appeared as the B-side of his single “Concrete and Clay,” a cover of the old Unit 4 + 2 hit. In that form — a songwriter’s album track flipped onto the back of a 45 — the most famous song of Edelman’s writing career sat waiting for someone to hear what it could become.
The Phone Call From Clive Davis
That someone was Roger Birnbaum, a West Coast A&R man at Arista Records, who brought Edelman’s recording to the attention of label president Clive Davis. Davis was in the process of one of the great comebacks in the record business, rebuilding his career at the newly formed Arista after his dismissal from CBS, and Manilow — a jingle writer and former accompanist whom Davis had championed — was the label’s flagship pop act. Davis listened to the song and heard a hit trapped inside an imperfect frame. As he later recalled: “The choruses were beautiful, but the verses needed to be [more] accessible melodically. So I asked Edelman to rewrite the melody of the verses, and if it came out strong, I would ask Manilow to record it.”
Edelman was in Britain promoting “Concrete and Clay” when the long-distance call came. Rather than taking offense, he found Davis’s critique precise and constructive: “[Davis went] off on a detailed discussion of why the harmonics in the verse didn’t work [but] in [such] a way that I didn’t feel that my creativity was being challenged.” Davis made clear Manilow would likely record the song in any case, but added that “some simplification could really make it a hit. And he was right.” Within a week, Edelman delivered a customised, simplified verse melody. A B-side had been re-engineered, at a label president’s personal request, into a vehicle for the biggest ballad singer in America.
Manilow Makes It His Own
Manilow recorded the song for This One’s for You, his fourth studio album, released in August 1976, producing the track with Ron Dante — the former voice of the Archies who had become his studio partner — with orchestration by Gerald Atlers. Where Edelman’s original had the looseness of a songwriter’s demo, Manilow’s version follows the dramatic architecture he was making famous: a solitary piano and an almost conversational opening verse, the narrator back in the city on a grey morning, measuring the distance between his real life and the two days he has just spent by the sea. “Time in New England took me away,” he sings, to “long rocky beaches and you by the bay” — and with each return of the chorus the arrangement gathers strings and horns behind the question the whole song hangs on: when will I hold you again?
Cash Box praised the record on release, noting that “a piano plays in the foreground, the vocal is strong and right to the point” and “the production is overflowing with horns and strings.” Record World called it a “sweeping ballad delivered in the style that has made [Manilow] one of the country’s leading male vocalists.” It was, in other words, the full Manilow treatment — intimacy inflated to orchestral scale — applied to a melody that had been deliberately simplified so that nothing stood between the listener and the longing.
The band behind him was the compact touring unit Manilow trusted on his mid-seventies records: Richard Resnicoff on guitar, Steven Donaghey on bass, Alan Axelrod on keyboards and Lee Gurst on drums, with Manilow himself at the piano and Atlers’ orchestration wrapped around them. The construction rewards the lyric’s geography. The verses move in the present tense — the city, the clear grey morning after — while the choruses keep slipping backwards into the remembered weekend, and the arrangement enacts that slip every time, the strings rising like the coastline coming back into view. It is a record about distance engineered to make the distance feel shorter each time it plays, which may be the whole secret of its radio life: a song whose narrator cannot get back to New England, delivered in a form that returns there every three minutes and forty-three seconds.
Passed Over, Then Unstoppable
Oddly, Arista did not lead with it. When This One’s for You appeared in August 1976, “Weekend in New England” was passed over as the lead single, though it was purposefully earmarked for later release. The title track went first — and stalled at a disappointing No. 29 on the Hot 100, a rare stumble for Manilow at the height of his hit streak. Arista turned to the song Davis had rebuilt. Released in November 1976 with “Say the Words” on the B-side, “Weekend in New England” entered the Top 20 of the Hot 100 on January 29, 1977, and peaked at No. 10. On the Adult Contemporary chart it went all the way to No. 1, maintaining what Billboard’s historians describe as Manilow’s virtual “lock” on that chart’s top spot. It also reached No. 9 in Canada and No. 9 on the Cash Box Top 100, topped the Canadian Adult Contemporary chart as well, and finished 1977 among the year’s top 100 singles in the United States — No. 65 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot 100 and as high as No. 12 on Cash Box‘s year-end tally, a placing that reflects how steadily it sold and played long after its weekly peak had passed. The album’s third single, “Looks Like We Made It,” would take Manilow back to No. 1 on the Hot 100 that summer — but it was “Weekend in New England” that had rescued the album’s campaign.
The Song That Started an Argument
Most ballads fade into the oldies format; this one started a conversation that ran for thirty years. The lyric’s ambiguity — a man back in the city, aching for a woman he left by the bay — invited an obvious question: who was waiting, and who had been left behind? In 1986, Reba McEntire supplied one answer with “Whoever’s in New England,” written from the perspective of the wife at home who suspects exactly where her husband’s business trips are taking him. McEntire’s record became one of her signature hits, topping the country chart and winning her the Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. Two decades later, in 2007, Sugarland’s “Stay” — written by Jennifer Nettles — answered from the other side of the affair, in the voice of the woman in New England asking the man not to go home. “Stay” became a multi-award-winning hit in its own right, including a Grammy for its performers. A single understated ballad had generated a wife’s rebuttal and a mistress’s plea, each a hit a generation apart.
The song itself travelled widely, too. It was covered by Jim Nabors, Vera Lynn, Des O’Connor, Roger Whittaker, Regine Velasquez, John Barrowman and Michael Ball, among many others, and it remains a fixture of Manilow’s concerts, where its opening piano figure is enough to bring an arena to attention. Edelman, meanwhile, went on to a second career as one of Hollywood’s busiest film composers — a fitting afterlife for a man who had always written in widescreen. But everything in that later career, and everything in the song’s long argument with itself, traces back to a B-side, a long-distance phone call, and a record-company president who heard a perfect chorus hiding behind the wrong verses — and refused to let it stay hidden.