“Once A Fool” is a quiet, late-night self-portrait—when pride finally admits it has a weakness, and the heart confesses it still runs toward the same old fire.
By the time “Once A Fool” surfaced in October 1979, David Cassidy was living in a very different kind of spotlight than the one that had once followed him everywhere. The song wasn’t launched with the fanfare of a major album campaign; it arrived almost like a footnote—paired on a MCA/Curb single where “Hurt So Bad” took the lead and “Once A Fool” sat on the other side of the vinyl, waiting for the listener who always flips the record over. That release is documented as MCA/Curb #41101, October 1979.
And that context matters, because it explains the particular ache the track carries today. This was not a chart-era triumph. In standard discography listings, the 1979 single did not register major U.S. chart positions—a reality that says less about the song’s quality than about the hard weather of pop careers, when the public can be eager to remember the “first act” and strangely reluctant to hear the later chapters.
Yet “Once A Fool” has an enduring backbone: it was written by the celebrated songwriting team Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, a duo known for crafting songs that sound simple on the surface while hiding emotional bruises beneath. Multiple reference sources credit them directly for Cassidy’s recording. And the song itself has a longer life beyond Cassidy: it was first released by Gene Redding in 1974, with later recordings by other artists—proof that its central idea is the kind people keep returning to when they need language for regret that won’t leave them alone.
So what is that idea?
“Once A Fool” is built on a painfully recognizable loop: the narrator sees the trap clearly—knows exactly how it ends—yet feels himself stepping into it anyway. It’s not the dramatic heartbreak of slammed doors; it’s the quieter humiliation of self-knowledge. The title is the whole wound in four words: if you’ve fallen for the same illusion before, what makes you think you’ll be immune this time? Cassidy’s gift, even outside his best-known era, was always that warm vulnerability in the vocal—an ability to sound like he’s admitting something rather than performing it. In that sense, “Once A Fool” plays like an after-hours confession from someone who has stopped trying to look invincible.
There’s also a bittersweet irony in where the song ended up living officially for many listeners. While it originated in that 1979 single context, it later appeared on the compilation Classic Songs (released February 27, 1996), where it sits among a curated set that reframes Cassidy not as a frozen teenage image, but as a vocalist moving through pop standards and adult contemporary material with real craft. That later release date doesn’t replace the song’s original moment—it simply gave it a more stable home in the catalogue, the way some songs have to wait for the world to catch up to their smaller, sadder truths.
If you listen to “Once A Fool” with the rest of Cassidy’s story in mind, the song’s meaning deepens. It becomes less about a single romantic mistake and more about the universal cost of longing: how easily the heart confuses familiarity with destiny, how quickly it forgives what it swore it wouldn’t forgive again. The track doesn’t preach. It doesn’t “resolve.” It simply sits with the knowledge that our weakest pattern is often the one that feels most like love.
And maybe that’s why this modest, almost hidden release still draws attention from listeners who stumble upon it decades later. Hits announce themselves. Songs like “Once A Fool” wait—patiently—until somebody needs exactly what they’re saying: that old, uneasy comfort of realizing you’re not the only one who saw the warning sign… and kept walking anyway.