I'm a Believer

I'm a Believer is the title of a song by the US pop group The Monkees in 1966. The track was the band's most successful single and one of their fastest-selling records. The song was written by Neil Diamond.

History

Casting band The Monkees had accepted that the music of their tracks was played by studio musicians and that the head of their record label, Don Kirshner, felt their skills were inadequate. Such was the case on the two recording days for I'm a Believer / (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone, October 15 and 23, 1966, in New York City. Jeff Barry, as producer of the A-side, hired, among others, the young composer of the title, Neil Diamond, as acoustic guitarist, Buddy Salzman as drummer and Carol Kaye of The Wrecking Crew as bassist. The only one allowed to sing was Micky Dolenz, whose vocals were added in Hollywood to the instrumental playback thus prepared by way of overdubbing.

Diamond's lyrics about the first true love, which doesn't only exist in fairy tales and only for others, were underpinned by the interplay between guitar and organ, which forms the dominant bracket of the track. Take 18 was eventually used as the master and went into record production. On November 12, 1966, the single was released as Colgems #1002, only the second record on the fledgling label. RCA took over distribution of the pop song.

Million seller

After the Monkees performed their first concert in Honolulu on December 3, 1966, I'm a Believer was featured in episode 13 ("One Man Shy" or "Peter and the Debutante") of the sitcom series The Monkees on December 5, 1966.

At that time, there were a total of 1,051,280 pre-orders for the single. Starting in December 1966, and continuing into early 1967, over three million copies of the single were sold in the U.S. within two months. Because of the pre-orders alone, it received a gold record. It sold 750,000 copies in the UK, and an estimated ten million worldwide. It went on to become the biggest-selling single of 1967, a year in which the Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined. Five million LPs in 1967 alone was an unprecedented amount for the music industry.

After entering the charts on 10 December 1966, the single shot to number one on 31 December 1966, where it remained for seven weeks. By the turn of the year, it was listed at number one in 16 countries, including four weeks in the UK and five weeks in Germany from 11 February 1967.