A Hymn to Becoming: The Search for Meaning Through Sound and Spirit
When Neil Diamond released “Be” in 1973 as part of his ambitious soundtrack for the film Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the song immediately stood apart from the pop landscape of its time. Featured on the album Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)—a record that soared to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and earned Diamond a Grammy Award for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture—the track encapsulates the film’s spiritual aspirations while transcending them. “Be” was issued as a single and found modest chart success, but its true legacy lies not in radio rankings, but in its enduring resonance as one of Diamond’s most ethereal and contemplative works.
The story of “Be” is one of transformation—both in narrative intent and artistic identity. In adapting Richard Bach’s allegorical novella about a seagull who defies the ordinary to seek higher truth, Diamond found a mirror for his own creative philosophy. This was not the showman of sequined shirts or stadium anthems; this was the seeker, the poet beneath the performer, using melody as meditation. “Be” became the thematic and emotional centerpiece of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, functioning as both an overture and benediction to a journey toward enlightenment.
Musically, “Be” unfolds like a sunrise: tentative at first, then radiant with revelation. Its orchestration—lush strings intertwined with gentle piano and Diamond’s resonant baritone—was crafted with cinematic grandeur under the guidance of arranger Lee Holdridge. The music does not simply accompany words; it breathes with them. Each note seems to hover between introspection and transcendence, mirroring the story’s flight motif and the soul’s restless yearning for purpose.
At its core, “Be” is an invocation—a call to awaken, to remember that life’s highest act is not merely existing but becoming. Diamond’s lyrics, suffused with poetic humility, speak to the universal tension between limitation and aspiration. The repetition of that single imperative—“be”—operates as both command and comfort, urging listeners toward self-realization without prescribing what form it must take. In this way, Diamond channels the mysticism of the early 1970s—a decade wrestling with disillusionment yet hungry for spiritual renewal—and distills it into something deeply personal yet profoundly communal.
Decades later, “Be” remains one of Neil Diamond’s most moving compositions precisely because it resists easy categorization. It is not quite pop, not entirely gospel, nor strictly cinematic; rather, it exists in a liminal space where sound becomes philosophy. To listen is to be reminded that artistry, at its best, does what words alone cannot: it points us toward our own unfolding. And so, in its quiet majesty, “Be” endures—not as a relic of its era, but as an eternal whisper to rise above ourselves and simply… be.