Mother and Child Reunion” in David Cassidy’s hands feels like a late-life exhale—walking away from noise, holding grief gently, and choosing calm as a form of courage.
David Cassidy recorded “Mother and Child Reunion” as a cover on his final studio album, A Touch of Blue, released in the UK on November 3, 2003—with the song placed as Disc 1, track 9 (running 3:29). The track itself was not launched as a single, so it had no individual chart debut under Cassidy’s name. Its public “arrival” is inseparable from the album’s own chart footprint: A Touch of Blue first entered the UK Official Albums Chart on 15/11/2003 at No. 61 (its peak), and remained on the chart for 2 weeks. That small, brief chart run almost suits the mood—this isn’t music built for a parade. It’s music built for the quiet hours, when you’d rather hear a human voice than a headline.
The choice of “Mother and Child Reunion” is, on paper, surprising. The song is indelibly linked to Paul Simon, who released it as a single on January 17, 1972, and took it to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100; Billboard’s own chart history lists its debut at No. 85 (debut chart date 02/05/1972) and a peak at No. 4. In the UK, it reached No. 5 on the Official Singles Chart. Simon’s original also carried a fresh sonic passport for its era: recorded at Dynamic Sounds Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, with musicians associated with Jimmy Cliff’s backing group, it was among the early high-profile pop songs by a non-Jamaican artist to bring reggae’s swing and warmth into the mainstream.
Yet what matters most is not the surprise of Cassidy choosing it—but the emotional logic of why it fits him in 2003.
Because “Mother and Child Reunion” has always been a song that smiles while it aches. Simon famously took the title from a “mother and child reunion” dish he saw on a Chinese restaurant menu—chicken and eggs—then wrote lyrics shaped by grief after a beloved dog was killed, the first death he felt personally, and the thoughts that grief stirred about larger losses. That mix—ordinary life and sudden sorrow, humor and a bruise under the skin—is exactly the terrain where a later-career Cassidy can sound most truthful. It is not a song about being dramatic; it is a song about staying upright when the world turns strange and mournful.
On A Touch of Blue, Cassidy presents himself not as the emblem the world once projected onto him, but as a man choosing songs of love, loss, and longing—a record widely described as his 17th and final studio album, produced by Ted Carfrae, and packaged with a bonus disc of re-recorded hits that quietly acknowledges the distance between “then” and “now.” In that setting, “Mother and Child Reunion” feels like a reflective centerpiece: a song about motion—about leaving a painful place—sung by an artist who knew what it meant to outgrow the rooms people tried to keep him in.
The meaning turns gently, almost deceptively. The lyric refuses false hope, and yet it offers a slim, almost spiritual comfort: the reunion is “only a motion away.” Not a guarantee. Not a miracle on demand. Just the idea that connection—between the living and what’s been lost, between the self you are and the self you remember—might still be reachable by choosing movement, by choosing life. Cassidy doesn’t need to oversell that idea. If anything, his mature approach makes it feel more believable: less like a slogan, more like a private practice.
There’s also something quietly poignant in how this particular song carries two different kinds of “return.” In Simon’s world, the “reunion” is the ache of separation, and the strange hope that distance is not final. In Cassidy’s world—this late chapter, this album that charted briefly and then slipped away—“reunion” can feel like the relationship between an artist and his own past: the old fame, the old expectations, the old photographs in other people’s minds. By choosing a song that treats grief with tenderness rather than spectacle, Cassidy seems to be saying: the only way back to oneself is not through noise, but through honesty.
So “Mother and Child Reunion” becomes, in this 2003 recording, a kind of soft departure song—music for stepping out of the crowd without bitterness. It doesn’t rewrite history; it doesn’t argue with it. It simply offers a small, steady truth: sometimes survival is the ability to keep walking, even with sorrow beside you, trusting that what you loved is not entirely gone—only, perhaps, a motion away.