“I Woke Up in Love This Morning” is that rare kind of pop sunrise—when a simple melody makes you believe, for three minutes, that tomorrow can start clean and bright.
If you’re calling it “David Cassidy – I Woke Up in Love,” you’re feeling something true: the song belongs to his voice. But officially, “I Woke Up in Love This Morning” was released as a The Partridge Family single in August 1971, on Bell Records, with David Cassidy singing the lead. It was taken from the album Sound Magazine (also released August 1971). On the single, the B-side was “Twenty-Four Hours a Day,” and the record was produced by the Partridge hitmaker Wes Farrell. The songwriters were L. Russell Brown and Irwin Levine—a team that understood how to build a hook that feels like a smile you can’t quite explain.
Chart-wise, its “arrival” was genuinely solid for a TV-born pop act: it peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 14 on Billboard Adult Contemporary. It also did especially well outside the U.S., reaching No. 4 in Canada and No. 5 in Australia. And while the single carried its own success, the parent album Sound Magazine rose even higher—reaching a No. 9 peak on Billboard’s album chart in late September 1971, the same week the single hit its U.S. peak.
But numbers aren’t the real reason this song still glows. The real story is the feeling it captured—and the moment in culture when it arrived. The Partridge Family was television’s bright, friendly fantasy of family-and-music as a kind of portable shelter. Yet David Cassidy’s vocal made that fantasy feel personal. He didn’t sing like a cartoon teen idol; he sang like someone who needed the good news. That’s why the title lands so beautifully: “I woke up in love this morning.” Not “I fell in love,” not “I found love”—but woke up already inside it, as if love had become the weather, the light in the room, the first breath.
There’s also craft behind the charm. The Sound Magazine sessions were recorded at United Western in Hollywood, under Wes Farrell, with top-tier studio players—Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel and Mike Melvoin on piano/keys, plus polished backing vocalists including Ron Hicklin and Jackie Ward. That’s the unseen engine of the Partridge sound: not raw garage energy, but precision pop—clean lines, bright harmonies, and a rhythmic snap that makes the chorus feel like it’s stepping forward to meet you.
And then there’s the “behind-the-song” detail that makes it even more of its time: the track wasn’t just on the album; it was also part of the TV universe—one of the Sound Magazine songs featured on the show. In the early ’70s, that mattered. A song could be both a piece of radio life and a little weekly ritual in the living room—music tied to routines, to familiar faces, to the comfort of something reliably upbeat when the world outside felt less orderly.
Meaning-wise, “I Woke Up in Love This Morning” is deceptively simple. It’s not a complex psychological portrait; it’s the moment before complexity arrives. It’s the heart choosing optimism—choosing to see love as something that renews itself overnight. That’s why the melody feels like a fresh sheet snapped onto a bed, why the chorus hits with such clean joy. The song doesn’t argue with sadness; it simply outruns it, at least for a morning.
And perhaps that’s why it endures. Because we don’t only miss the era—the clothes, the TV glow, the AM-radio sparkle. We miss the feeling that a three-minute pop song could make the day seem salvageable. David Cassidy sang a lot of bright promises in those years, but this one is special: it doesn’t sound like he’s selling you a dream. It sounds like he’s waking up and being surprised—gratefully, almost helplessly—by happiness itself.