Solitaire

Neil Sedaka wrote this song with Philip Cody, who collaborated with Sedaka on his comeback hits "Laughter In The Rain" and "Bad Blood." In this song, the card game solitaire becomes a metaphor for loneliness, as a man finds himself alone after losing his love. Cody told us: "Neil just hit me with a lot of sad music, and that kind of thing for me was a surprise - I didn't know I had that in me. But Neil encouraged me to make him cry. So I went for that particular part of Neil's throat - I was trying to get a reaction out of Neil, and if I got a reaction out of Neil, I knew I'd done good. Because I had no idea what a hit song was. I'd been in the studio and I'd been out and about on the streets for six years at that point. But this was the first time that I ever really hooked up with anyone who actually knew what they were doing."

Neil Sedaka recorded this song in 1974, but it was the Carpenters who had the big hit with their 1975 recording, thanks to a mighty vocal performance by Karen Carpenter. Sedaka, who fell off the charts when the Beatles took over, enjoyed a resurgence as a performer and songwriter in the mid-'70, and this was one of his most successful compositions. Neil had to push for this song, as his publisher Don Kirshner didn't think much of it.

Some of the many artists to record this song include Andy Williams, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Presley and Clay Aiken. For the Andy Williams version, his producer Richard Perry asked the song's lyricist Philip Cody to change some of the words to make them easier to sing. Cody balked at first, and then came to accept that altering his words to accommodate a popular singer wasn't the worst thing in the world. Said Cody: "Once I let go of the idea that my lyrics were inviolate, it went rather smoothly. Over the course of time, as the Carpenters did the song, they basically did a mash-up of the old lyric and the new lyric, which actually was better than either of the two, the Andy Williams or Neil's original. I think the Carpenters' version was the one that I like best."