In “What’s It Gonna Be”, Neil Diamond turns the restless heart into a mirror—asking, with quiet insistence, whether we’ll keep running in circles or finally choose the life we truly want.
On November 8, 2005, Neil Diamond released 12 Songs, a late-career record that didn’t try to sound young or fashionable—it tried to sound true. Produced by Rick Rubin, the album arrived with an intimacy that felt almost startling for an artist so often associated with big stages and bright lights. It debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200, a reminder that a seasoned voice, when it speaks plainly, can still draw the world close enough to listen.
Inside that album sits “What’s It Gonna Be”—credited as composed by Neil Diamond, and presented not as a radio single but as a deeper conversation meant for the patient listener. The track appears as #8 on the official running order, and its recorded length is 4:04. This is important, because “What’s It Gonna Be” doesn’t feel like a song designed to compete in the noise of the day. It feels like something you come back to at night—when the room is quieter, when the past has a louder voice, when your own choices begin to stand in the doorway.
The story that frames the song is the story of 12 Songs itself. After finishing the tour cycle behind earlier work, Diamond began writing again in seclusion, famously retreating to his Colorado cabin, where a stretch of isolation helped restart the engine of new material. Then came Rick Rubin, a producer known not for adding polish, but for removing it—encouraging Diamond to keep writing over time until the songs felt inevitable, then capturing them with a band built for feel rather than flash (including Tom Petty collaborators Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, among others). In that kind of creative weather, “What’s It Gonna Be” makes perfect sense: it sounds like a man who has lived long enough to stop romanticizing his own confusion.
Even the opening sentiment—“First you’re runnin’ one way / Then you run another…”—lands like a small confession many people keep hidden from themselves. It’s not about scandal or spectacle. It’s about the interior motion of a life: the way we chase one answer, then the next, hoping that speed will substitute for certainty. Diamond doesn’t judge the running. He understands it. But he also understands the cost—the way years can slip by while the heart stays undecided.
That’s why the title question, “What’s It Gonna Be,” carries a special weight here. In younger hands, it might sound like a romantic ultimatum. In Diamond’s 2005 voice, it becomes something broader and more haunting: What will you choose to become? What will you finally stop pretending not to know? The song doesn’t demand a neat resolution; it demands honesty. It asks for a decision not because love is cruel, but because time is.
Rubin’s production keeps the emotional camera close. 12 Songs is widely described as a stripped-back, songwriter-forward album—Diamond placed right at the center, his phrasing allowed to be human, his edges left unhidden. And that closeness gives “What’s It Gonna Be” its particular kind of ache: the sense that this isn’t performance so much as presence. A voice beside you, not above you.
In the end, the meaning of “What’s It Gonna Be” is not merely indecision—it’s the moment you recognize the pattern and realize you can’t keep living inside it. The song holds a mirror up to the beautiful, exhausting habit of searching everywhere except inward. And when Diamond asks his question, he doesn’t sound angry. He sounds weary in the wisest way—like someone who has learned that the bravest thing isn’t to keep moving, but to choose a direction and stay with it.
That’s the quiet magic of Neil Diamond in this era. On 12 Songs, he wasn’t chasing the past. He was turning it into clarity. And in “What’s It Gonna Be,” that clarity becomes a gentle, unforgettable reckoning—one that lingers long after the last note fades.