Barry Manilow – I Write The Songs

The ultimate songwriter’s boast — “I write the songs that make the whole world sing” — was sung by a man who didn’t write it, recorded by two other acts before him, and penned by a touring Beach Boy who insists the “I” isn’t even a person.

There is a small, delicious irony sitting at the center of one of the biggest hits of Barry Manilow’s career. I Write the Songs sounds like the grandest possible statement of authorship — “I write the songs that make the whole world sing” — and Manilow didn’t write a word of it. The song came from Bruce Johnston, a touring and recording member of the Beach Boys, and Manilow was so wary of how it might look that he nearly turned it down flat.

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Johnston wrote the song in 1975, during a several-year break from the Beach Boys, and he has spent the decades since correcting a persistent misreading of it. The “I” in the lyric, he has explained, isn’t him and isn’t any single performer — for Johnston, the line is about where music itself comes from, a kind of universal creative spirit he attributes to God. The song is sometimes wrongly rumored to be about Brian Wilson; Johnston has flatly denied it. He first played it for friends who had toured with the Beach Boys themselves — Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille — and the Captain & Tennille cut the first-ever recording, tucking it onto their 1975 debut album Love Will Keep Us Together without releasing it as a single.

The song that went looking for a singer

It took a winding road to reach Manilow. The first version released as a single came from teen idol David Cassidy, with Johnston himself producing; it reached No.11 in the UK in 1975. Neil Diamond reportedly considered recording it and passed. Then Clive Davis, the head of Manilow’s label Arista, heard Cassidy’s version and became convinced the song belonged to Manilow. Manilow resisted. He later wrote in his autobiography Sweet Life that the trouble was the lyric — if you weren’t listening closely, it sounded as though the singer was bragging about himself, and he feared it could come across as a monumental ego trip. Davis pushed, and Manilow gave in.

He was right about the risk and wrong about the outcome. Released in late 1975 as the lead single from Tryin’ to Get the Feeling, I Write the Songs entered the Billboard Hot 100 in November and climbed to No.1 in January 1976, becoming the second of Manilow’s three career pop chart-toppers. It spent two weeks atop the adult contemporary chart, lingered 20 weeks on the Hot 100, and the following year won the Grammy for Song of the Year — an award that goes to the writer, making Johnston, for many years, the only Beach Boy with a Grammy.

The boast that became his signature

The irony only deepened with time. The song most associated with Barry Manilow, a genuinely prolific songwriter who wrote “Could It Be Magic,” “Copacabana,” and hundreds of others, is the one he didn’t write — and he has made peace with it. In a 2026 interview, more than fifty years on, Manilow named I Write the Songs as his single favorite among all his recordings. He performed it at the Grammy ceremony, has kept it in his concert sets for half a century, and long ago stopped worrying that anyone would mistake the boast for the truth. It turns out the song that sounds like the ultimate act of self-authorship works best as exactly what Johnston intended: a song about the thing that writes through all of us.