Some songs succeed in spite of the vehicle that carried them. In December 1980, Neil Diamond made his acting debut in a troubled remake of The Jazz Singer, and the critics were merciless: the film was panned, Diamond’s performance was singled out, and he walked away with the very first Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor. Yet the music he wrote for that film became the biggest-selling album of his career in the United States. At the centre of it sat a quiet, unhurried ballad about a man picking up a telephone in the middle of the night to speak to the people he had left behind. “Hello Again” was never the loudest song on the soundtrack, but it became, in the words of AllMusic critic Johnny Loftus, Diamond’s “signature late-career ballad” — the one that kept saying hello long after the film had said goodbye.
A remake built around a singer
The Jazz Singer carried more history than any remake could comfortably bear. Samson Raphaelson’s 1925 play, about a cantor’s son who defies his father to sing popular music, had become the 1927 Al Jolson film that famously ushered in the talking-picture era. Producer Jerry Leider got the idea for a new version after seeing Diamond perform on a 1977 television special, reasoning that the singer could enjoy the same screen crossover as Elvis Presley or Barbra Streisand, whose A Star Is Born remake had just been a major success. Even securing the rights took a year, with Warner Bros. and United Artists both claiming ownership, and the project passed through several studios before EMI Films pressed ahead alone.
The remake was the property’s fourth screen incarnation, following the 1927 and 1952 films and a 1959 television version, and it very nearly lost its star before a frame was shot. Diamond, meanwhile, had built a safety valve into his contract: after back surgery in early 1979, he invoked a clause allowing him to finish the film’s original music before shooting began. During the delay, the studio and Leider even considered replacing him with Barry Manilow, before deciding to wait for their man. It meant the songs — written largely with collaborators including Gilbert Bécaud and his own musical director Alan Lindgren — were composed on Diamond’s terms, as pieces of music first and film cues second. That decision, taken for the most practical of reasons, is a large part of why the soundtrack could stand on its own once the film stumbled.
Writing the phone call
“Hello Again” was written by Diamond with Alan Lindgren, the keyboard player and arranger who had been the architectural backbone of his live band for years. Where “Love on the Rocks” was a bitter toast and “America” a full-throated anthem, “Hello Again” worked at the opposite scale: biographer Laura Jackson called it a “slow tender ballad,” and its lyric is built from the smallest of gestures. The singer cannot sleep; he picks up the phone; he calls someone he has been apart from far too long, simply to hear a familiar voice and say the two words of the title. There is no big dramatic confrontation in it, only distance, silence and the hope that the line between two people has not gone dead.
In the film’s story, that longing has a specific shape. Diamond plays Yussel Rabinovitch — “Jess Robin” on stage — a fifth-generation cantor torn between his father’s synagogue and the pop career calling him to Los Angeles, a journey that ends with his father angrily disowning him. A song about reaching back across an estrangement, sung by a son who has burned his bridges to chase a stage, could hardly have been more precisely placed. Billboard‘s critic Vicki Pipkin called Diamond’s performance of the song in the film “poignant,” and Record World praised the record’s “monumental string/piano arrangement” beneath a vocal delivered at “maximum dramatic intensity.” The soundtrack was produced by Bob Gaudio, the former Four Seasons member who understood better than most how to frame a big voice with strings, and who also shaped the album’s vocal arrangements. Lindgren himself handled the orchestral arrangements and conducting, while the sessions spread across some of Los Angeles’s finest rooms — the Record Plant, Sunset Sound, Cherokee and others — with Diamond’s road band, including guitarist Richard Bennett and drummer Dennis St. John, at the core. That matters, because “Hello Again” is not a studio confection sung by a film star; it is a working singer’s record, cut by the musicians who played behind him every night, with the writer of the melody sitting at the piano in the arranger’s chair.
The film stumbled; the album soared
Production, by contrast, was chaos. Director Sidney J. Furie struggled with his nervous first-time leading man, shot scenes with banks of cameras, and was fired in March 1980, with veteran Richard Fleischer brought in to perform what Leider later called a rescue operation. Laurence Olivier, paid a million dollars to play Diamond’s father, needed reining in as much as his co-star needed building up. The film opened on 19 December 1980 to poor reviews and a modest profit — around $27 million against a budget of roughly $14–15 million — and Diamond’s acting honours consisted of that inaugural Razzie.
The soundtrack album told the opposite story. Released on 10 November 1980 by Capitol rather than Diamond’s usual Columbia — the film came from EMI, Capitol’s parent company — it climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and has since been certified five times platinum in the United States, Diamond’s biggest-selling American album. Three of its songs reached the Hot 100’s top ten, a feat no one predicted from the reviews: “Love on the Rocks” hit No. 2, “Hello Again” followed, and “America” completed the set at No. 8. It was the second time one of Diamond’s soundtracks had eclipsed its film, after Jonathan Livingston Seagull — but never on this scale.
Nor was the phenomenon purely American. The album reached No. 3 in Britain as well, went three times platinum in Canada and platinum in the UK, and confirmed Diamond — whose Columbia contract had produced diminishing returns in the late 1970s — as a renewed commercial force heading into the 1980s, this time on Capitol. Reviewers who had savaged the film kept making an exception for the record, and radio programmers simply ignored the movie altogether and played the singles as what they were: new Neil Diamond hits.
A quiet single’s chart run
“Hello Again” was released as a single in January 1981, with the rocker “Amazed and Confused” on the B-side — about as complete a statement of the album’s two moods as a 45 could offer. The single version trimmed the song to 3:35 from the album’s 4:04, but nothing about its unhurried pace was modernised for radio. It worked anyway. The record reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and Billboard ranked it the 70th top pop single of 1981. Britain was cooler — a No. 51 peak, though the single was later certified silver there — while Ireland took it to No. 18. Pittsburgh critic Carl Apone had already identified it, alongside “Love on the Rocks,” as the moment where Diamond was at his best in the film, and author T. Mike Childs simply rated it a “terrific” ballad.
The ballad that stayed
Four decades on, “Hello Again” occupies a peculiar and secure place in Diamond’s catalogue: it is the grown-up ballad, the one about middle-aged distance rather than youthful hunger. It has been covered by acts as different as Celtic Thunder, Donny Osmond and Regine Velasquez, turned up in the film Saving Silverman, and was chosen by Syesha Mercado during Neil Diamond week on American Idol in 2008, when only five contestants remained. Each revival leans on the same quality the first reviewers heard — a famous voice deliberately singing softly, about the most ordinary and difficult act in adult life: calling someone you have wronged, or lost, or simply drifted from, and hoping they are glad to hear from you.
There is also a neat symmetry in where the song sits on the album. The Jazz Singer soundtrack closes its story with “Kol Nidre/My Name Is Yussel” and a reprise of “America,” the liturgy and the anthem resolving the film’s father-and-son war. “Hello Again,” opening side two, is the private version of that same reconciliation — not the public triumph of the finale but the quiet, necessary first step towards it, made alone, at night, by telephone. Diamond had spent the 1970s writing anthems for arenas; this was an anthem for a kitchen phone, and it turned out to be the most durable kind.
That is why the song survived its film. The Jazz Singer asked audiences to believe Neil Diamond was someone else; “Hello Again” simply let him be himself, a son of Brooklyn singing down a telephone line to everyone he had ever left behind. The movie won him a Razzie. The song won him five million album buyers — and it is still the one that greets you first, warm as a voice in the dark: hello again, hello.