Done Too Soon
“Done Too Soon” is a song written, composed, and performed by Neil Diamond, and released on his 1970 album Tap Root Manuscript. Listed as Track 4 on Side One of the album, it was jointly arranged by Marty Paich and Lee Holdridge and jointly produced by Diamond and Tom Catalano.
Content
"Done Too Soon" is a song of mortality, divided, stylistically, into two sections, a fast-paced first part and a slower, more introspective second part.[1]
Lyrics
The lyrics of "Done Too Soon" drop the following names, in order, in its fast-paced first part:
- Jesus Christ, central figure of Christianity
- Fanny Brice, American stage, screen, and radio comedian
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer
- Humphrey Bogart, American actor
- Genghis Khan, Mongolian military-political conqueror-adventurer
- H. G. Wells, British Victorian-era science-fiction writer
- Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese Communist leader moo
- Gunga Din, title character of the Rudyard Kipling poem
- Henry Luce, American publisher, founder of Time Magazine
- John Wilkes Booth, American actor, best remembered as the assassin of Abraham Lincoln
- Alexander King (Alexander the Great) (which one Diamond refers to is not specified)
- Alexander Graham Bell, elocution teacher and technologist best remembered for his invention of the telephone
- Ramakrishna, Indian mystic
- Anna Whistler, mother of American-born, British-resident painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, as he immortalized her in "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1"
- Patrice Lumumba, Congolese politician
- Russ Colombo, American entertainer
- Karl Marx, German philosopher
- Chico Marx, American comedy actor
- Albert Camus, French writer
- Edgar Allan Poe, American writer
- Henri Rousseau, French painter
- Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish author and playwright
- Caryl Chessman, American criminal
- Alan Freed, American disc jockey
- Buster Keaton, American silent-films actor
The slower, more introspective second part notes the commonalities between these twenty-five individuals. (Even though Gunga Din was a fictional character, he is listed with the other twenty-four because his name fits the syllabic count of the lyrics.) Those commonalities are these, as quoted from the lyrics:
- They have sweated beneath the same sun
- Looked up in wonder at the same moon
- And wept when it was all done
- For being done too soon
In this context, "being done too soon" means that all those whom Diamond identifies died before each of their times, with their lives's respective work unfinished, or both.
Music
The music of "Done Too Soon," which Diamond composed for his own baritone range, is in the key of A major.
The first couplets of each of the first part's two halves range in tone from A3 to A2, and the second couplets are primarily in the tone of Ab3, but these latter couplets each rise to a single B3 note before returning to A3.
The second part starts with a couplet whose two lines have the tones E1-D2-D2-B2, and in toto, its music is almost elegiac in sound.
History
As of April 2015, the story of how Diamond had come to write and compose "Done Too Soon" was not clear.
Chart performance
"Done Too Soon" did not truly chart, because Diamond never actually released it as a single.
Notable cover versions
Also as of April 2015, "Done Too Soon" was not known to have been interpreted by any other artists than Diamond himself.