This song was written by Horace Ott, Bennie Benjamin and Sol Marcus. Benjamin and Marcus were a songwriting team that had been working together since the '40s; their compositions include "Lonely Man" by Elvis Presley and "Fabulous Character" by Sarah Vaughan. Ott is an arranger who worked on tracks for Nat King Cole and Aretha Franklin, and later gave life to most of the Village People's material - you can thank him for those horn lines on "Y.M.C.A." Ott started writing the song after getting in a heated argument with Gloria Caldwell, whom he had recently married. Sitting down at the piano, he expressed in song how he was well intentioned, but misunderstood by his wife - a sentiment many married men could relate to. Gloria Caldwell is listed on the credit instead of Ott because of contractual issues. She learned to understand him: the couple stayed together.
Nina Simone was the first to record this song, releasing an orchestrated, downtempo rendition on her 1964 album Broadway-Blues-Ballads that nicked the US chart at #131. The best-known version is by The Animals, who reworked it into a rock song. Eric Burdon recalled in Rolling Stone magazine, "It was never considered pop material, but it somehow got passed on to us and we fell in love with it immediately."
In our 2010 interview with Eric Burdon, he said: "I've really been misunderstood. By my mom, my dad, school teachers, a couple of the women that I married. I've been misunderstood all of my life."
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