HE WROTE A SONG FOR THE CARPENTERS, 5TH DIMENSION MADE IT A HIT INSTEAD
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The song “(Last Night) I Didn’t Get to Sleep at All,” written by Tony Macaulay in the early ’70s might be one of the most literal song titles ever written. The hit writer suffered from jet lag and headed to a songwriting session in Tokyo on no sleep.
Nashville Songwriters Association International Executive Director Bart Herbison chatted with Macaulay about how this song was written and how it got recorded by the 5th Dimension as part of the Story Behind the Song series.
The origins of this song date to the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, where Macaulay and some other British songwriters were attending a songwriting festival.
“I really suffer from jet lag,” Macaulay said. “I used to fly 100,000 miles a year and wherever I went with a time change, I always suffered from it. And there I was with a 10- or 12-hour time change or something and I was dopey all day and awake all night. So the last night, I didn’t get to sleep at all with the jet lag.”
He said the first eight bars of the song came easy, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with it. So he played what he had for Karen Carpenter, of The Carpenters, who at that time had just had a big hit with “Close to You” and they were just starting to promote “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Macaulay remembers that she seemed to like it, even though she might have just been being polite.
Back in England, Macaulay had an opportunity to finish his song.
“So I got this little melody out and I thought, ‘well... is it a verse? Is it a hook?’ Because I was always looking for a hook for it. I thought, ‘well, maybe it’s this old 32-measure song, you know, with a melody, a melody, a bridge and a melody . ... Maybe I can do something with that as an album track.’ That was really all I thought. So I wrote a bridge to it very quickly. The bridge melody is quite repetitive because it was all done very fast.”
All he lacked was to complete the vocals. During a 45-minute drive to a studio session, he wrote the lyrics and had the lead singer of the band he was recording put the vocals on the track.
He sent a demo for what he thought would be an album track (not to be released as a single) to The Carpenters.
“They said they loved it. They obviously forgot the eight-hour time change from L.A. to England so they called me about 3 o’clock in the morning. They woke me up and said, ‘We can’t record this. It talks about drugs. The Carpenters can’t sing about drugs,’ ” he said, referring to a line in the song about taking a sleeping pill.
Macaulay woke up the next morning, had a cup of coffee and rewrote the original line that said:
Last night I didn’t get to sleep at all. The sleeping pill I took was just a waste of time
He changed it to:
Last night, I didn’t get to sleep at all. Once or twice, I even reached out for your touch and prayed that you might even love me half as much.
After completing the new line, Macaulay called the studio where The Carpenters had been recording, only to discover they’d already left.
The song ended up in the hands of the 5th Dimension’s producer, Bones Howe, who hadn’t heard the new lyric because it wasn’t on the demo. So the group cut the original song and nobody ever heard the new verse. The song went on to reach No. 2 on the Adult Contemporary chart and No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In partnership with Nashville Songwriters Association International, the “Story Behind the Song” video interview series features Nashville-connected songwriters discussing one of their compositions. For full video interviews with all our subjects, visit tennessean.com/ music.