“Bedtime”—more accurately known as “Half Past Your Bedtime”—is David Cassidy’s small, midnight promise:a hush of tenderness that doesn’t chase the spotlight, but stays with you like a lamp left on for someone you love.
In the mid-1970s, David Cassidy was fighting to be heard as more than a memory from television—writing, co-producing, and choosing collaborators who could help him step into a warmer, more grown-up kind of pop. “Half Past Your Bedtime” belongs right to that chapter. It appears as the closing track on his 1976 RCA album Home Is Where the Heart Is (released March 1976, recorded at Caribou Ranch in Colorado, produced by Cassidy with Bruce Johnston). On Discogs and other catalog listings, it’s typically shown as B5 and runs about 2:44—a short track, but emotionally it feels like the record’s last soft breath before the lights go out.
The songwriting credit is the real eyebrow-raiser: David Cassidy, Gerry Beckley (of America), and Ricky Fataar. That combination matters. Beckley specialized in melodies that feel sunlit even when the lyric is wistful, and “Half Past Your Bedtime” has exactly that quality—affection wrapped in a slightly aching awareness that moments like this don’t last forever. Cassidy’s own fan discography sometimes prints the title as “Half-past Our Bedtime,” a tiny variation that actually suits the song’s intimacy: the difference between “your” and “our” is the difference between watching someone sleep and believing you truly belong together.
Now, about the “ranking at release,” with precision: “Half Past Your Bedtime” itself was not promoted as an A-side hit. Instead, it reached the public most visibly as the B-side of Cassidy’s 1976 single “Tomorrow” (RCA RCA 2645 in the UK). And here’s the important nuance for chart history: in 1976, the main UK chart was effectively a Top 50, and sources that compile “bubbling under” activity list “Tomorrow” at roughly No. 57 on a UK “Breakers” style listing rather than a full official Top 50 placement. (Some fan sources claim a much higher UK peak, but that isn’t supported by these chart-compilation references, so I’m not treating it as definitive.)
So if the charts didn’t crown it, what did?
They gave it a different kind of life—the kind that belongs to late-night listeners. “Half Past Your Bedtime” isn’t built like a single engineered to seize a week of radio. It’s built like an intimate ritual: the quiet conversation after the party, the last page before sleep, the warm weight of someone close enough to hear you whisper. Even the title carries a tender mischief—like two people deciding, together, to steal a few more minutes from the rules of the day.
The larger album context deepens the meaning. Home Is Where the Heart Is is often described as critically well received but not charting, a project where Cassidy leaned into craft—especially notable for his recording of Paul McCartney’s “Tomorrow,” which McCartney reportedly praised highly. That “serious musician” ambition—Caribou Ranch air, careful production, friends from the West Coast orbit—makes “Half Past Your Bedtime” feel like a personal signature at the end: this is who I am when the cameras are off.
And that is the song’s deeper meaning. “Half Past Your Bedtime” turns romance away from spectacle and back toward shelter. It isn’t about conquest or jealousy or drama. It’s about the gentler courage of staying—of choosing softness in a world that trains people to perform toughness. In Cassidy’s hands, “bedtime” becomes more than a clock reading. It becomes a small sanctuary: a place where you can stop proving yourself, stop outrunning your past, and simply hold on to what’s real for as long as the night allows.