“Where Is the Morning” is a small, searching candle of a song—about waiting through a sleepless night and begging daylight to arrive with answers, not just light.
On Cherish—the album that first let David Cassidy step out from the TV glow and sound like a young man with real private weather—“Where Is the Morning” feels like the moment the record quietly exhales. It isn’t a hit engineered for radio. It’s an album truth: a two–three minute confession meant for late hours, when the world goes still enough for your thoughts to get loud.
Here are the facts that frame everything, because they explain why the song lands the way it does. “Where Is the Morning” was written by Adam Miller and recorded for Cassidy’s debut solo album Cherish, produced by Wes Farrell. The album was recorded in 1971 at Western Recorders (Studio 2), Hollywood, and released in February 1972 (U.S.) by Bell Records. On the original track list, “Where Is the Morning” appears as track 8, running about 2:52–2:53 depending on listing.
But “Where Is the Morning” isn’t just a title in a track list—it’s a mood you recognize in your bones. The song opens with that most familiar kind of loneliness: the kind that won’t let you sleep. Not the dramatic loneliness that announces itself, but the ordinary, stubborn kind that sits on the edge of the bed and keeps you replaying the evening. The lyric’s emotional engine is simple: a night that won’t end, a mind that won’t quiet, and the desperate hope that morning will change the shape of everything. It’s not really a question about time; it’s a question about mercy. When will the dark lift? When will the confusion loosen its grip?
What makes David Cassidy such a compelling voice for this material—especially in early 1972—is that he’s singing at the exact crossroads between image and adulthood. Cherish arrived while he was famously visible, yet the best moments on the album sound as if he’s trying to get away from the noise long enough to tell the truth. In this song, he doesn’t perform anguish with big, theatrical gestures. He sings like someone trying not to wake the whole house with his worry. That restraint is the heartbreak: he’s not collapsing—he’s enduring.
And Adam Miller’s writing suits that endurance. Miller gives Cassidy lines that feel like thoughts you’d never say confidently in daylight—hesitant, self-questioning, emotionally exposed. It’s the kind of lyric that doesn’t demand you admire it; it asks you to recognize it. The question “Where is the morning?” becomes a kind of shorthand for every night you’ve lived through on sheer will, every time you’ve stared at the ceiling and waited for a new day to do what your own strength couldn’t.
Placed deep into Cherish, the song also benefits from context. By track 8, the album has already established a world of longing and tender uncertainty. Cassidy’s voice has had time to feel familiar, less like a public figure and more like a private companion. So when this song arrives, it doesn’t feel like a performance inserted into a record; it feels like the record finally admitting what it’s been circling all along: sometimes love and hope aren’t bright. Sometimes they’re dim, stubborn, and tired—yet still alive.
Commercially, the album’s success forms a quiet backdrop. Cherish reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200, and its title track single “Cherish” peaked at No. 9 in the U.S. (and No. 1 on Adult Contemporary), which meant plenty of listeners came for familiar warmth—and then discovered deeper cuts like this one. Wikipedia Yet “Where Is the Morning” wasn’t released as a single, and that feels right: it’s too intimate to be marketed loudly. It’s designed for the listener who keeps the album on after the obvious songs have passed.
In the end, “Where Is the Morning” endures because it doesn’t pretend that night is easy. It treats waiting as a real emotional labor. It captures the strange truth that morning isn’t only a time of day—it’s a symbol we cling to when we need proof that life can still turn a page. And in David Cassidy’s gentle, worn-in delivery, that question doesn’t sound poetic for its own sake. It sounds like something whispered into the dark by someone who truly wants to believe the light is on its way.