“The Letter” is heartbreak delivered without a knock—a Sunday-morning shock where one page of ink turns a shared life into silence.
David Cassidy’s “The Letter” belongs to his 1985 European comeback era, and its “chart identity” is inseparable from the single it quietly rode into the world on. In the UK, the Arista single “The Last Kiss” (catalogue ARIST 589) first entered the Official Singles Chart on 23 February 1985 at No. 67, then surged to a peak of No. 6—a genuine, headline-grabbing return to the upper reaches of pop. “The Letter” was the B-side to that release, issued in February 1985 in Britain and Europe (and notably not the U.S.), with collector notes even pointing out the single mix has a different intro from the album version.
If the single was the public victory, “The Letter” was the private bruise.
On the album Romance—Cassidy’s only studio album of the 1980s, released by Arista and recorded at RG Jones (London) with producer Alan Tarney—“The Letter” is credited to David Cassidy and Alan Tarney, like most of the record’s material. In the original LP sequence, it’s positioned as Side Two, Track 1, a deliberate “turn the record over and face the truth” placement that feels almost theatrical in hindsight. And while Romance was withheld from a U.S. release, it still made a clear mark in Britain: it first hit the Official Albums Chart on 8 June 1985 at No. 24, and reached a peak of No. 20 the following week (15 June 1985).
That’s the scaffolding. Now comes the human story the song tells.
“The Letter” opens on an image that’s as ordinary as it is devastating: a man wakes up and discovers that what remains of his relationship is not a conversation, not a goodbye at the door, but a letter left behind—final, tidy, and merciless in its quietness. The lyric doesn’t romanticize the breakup; it frames it as a kind of emotional ambush, where the ordinary morning light becomes cruel simply because it’s still shining. The song then turns the knife in a very 1980s-pop way—sharply drawn, almost cinematic—painting the departing lover as someone who treated commitment like entertainment and walked away when the thrill cooled.
What makes this track resonate isn’t the plot twist—many songs have been written about being left—but the delivery mechanism. A letter is heartbreak with no right of reply. It’s a door that closes and locks behind itself. It denies you the small dignities people crave at the end: the chance to ask one more question, to hear the hesitation in a voice, to catch the moment where a decision might still be reversible. In “The Letter,” the page becomes the villain: neat sentences that leave the narrator standing amid the wreckage, holding paper where a person used to be.
In that sense, the collaboration matters. Alan Tarney was a master of sleek, radio-ready pop craftsmanship, and on Romance he co-wrote much of the album with Cassidy while producing it—music engineered to move with the clean efficiency of the era. “The Letter” uses that polish not to soften the pain, but to sharpen it: heartbreak presented in a well-lit room, with nowhere to hide. It’s the opposite of melodrama. It’s controlled—almost too controlled—which is precisely how some emotional disasters arrive in real life. Not with screaming. With a calm note on the table.
There’s a bittersweet irony, too, in the way “The Letter” reached most listeners: tucked behind a hit that signaled renewal. “The Last Kiss” climbing to UK No. 6 made headlines; “The Letter” sat on the reverse side like a confession you only hear when you flip the record over, after the applause. And perhaps that’s exactly where it belongs. Because “The Letter” isn’t a song about winning back love—it’s about realizing, too late, that love doesn’t always announce its ending with a scene. Sometimes it simply leaves you a document, and you spend the rest of the day rereading it, searching for a sentence that might secretly mean, I’ll be back.
If “The Letter” still stirs something decades later, it’s because it names a particular kind of loss: the kind that arrives in silence, wearing the disguise of good handwriting.