Neil Diamond made an admirable and valiant effort to remove himself from this list in the fall of 2005. He hired the legendary Rick Rubin to produce a radically stripped down album of some of the best songs Neil Diamond has written in many years. The same type of strategy worked wonders for Johnny Cash, but...Johnny Cash would not have been on this list in the first place.
Listening to last fall's 12 Songs I just kept having the feeling that the Neil Diamond I knew was somewhere inside struggling to get out. There really is a sort of perverse musical joy in "Song Sung Blue", "I Am..I Said", and "Longfellow Serenade", and I love Neil for it. There are limits, however. Let's just forget "Forever in Blue Jeans" ever happened.
