“I Got the Feelin’ (Oh No No)” is Neil Diamond’s early warning siren—when your heart senses trouble before your pride can invent a happier story, and all you can do is sing the dread out loud.
In the crowded pop landscape of 1966, before the stadium choruses and the grand, cinematic ballads, Neil Diamond was still carving his name into radio with lean, urgent singles—records that sounded like they’d been written on the run and recorded with the clock ticking. “I Got the Feelin’ (Oh No No)” belongs to that formative Bang-era chapter: written by Neil Diamond, first recorded and released by him in 1966, and issued as the A-side of Bang Records single B-536, backed with “The Boat That I Row.”
Its chart story is modest compared to what Diamond would later command, but it’s still the mark of a real, working hit: the song reached No. 16 on the U.S. charts (as listed in his singles discography), and it also charted internationally, including Canada (No. 67) and New Zealand (No. 6) in the same discography table. In other words, it wasn’t just a local ripple—it was already the sound of a songwriter-singer learning how far his instincts could travel.
What makes “I Got the Feelin’ (Oh No No)” so enduring isn’t its statistics, though. It’s the emotional mechanism—simple, human, nearly embarrassing in its honesty. The title itself is basically a sentence you mutter when the room’s mood shifts: something’s off… I can feel it. And then comes that parenthetical plea—“(Oh No No)”—a little chant that feels like the mind’s last attempt to push back against what the body already knows. It’s not poetic, not dressed up, not trying to be profound. It’s the sound of denial cracking in real time.
That’s why the record still hits with a certain nostalgic sting. Many songs from the mid-’60s sell confidence: romance as conquest, heartbreak as melodrama, swagger as a virtue. Neil Diamond, even here, does something slightly different. He dramatizes foreboding—the dread that arrives before the goodbye, before the proof, before you can point to a single “reason” and claim you were right. It’s the kind of feeling you recognize later, looking back: the moment you laughed too loudly at a joke because you didn’t want anyone to notice your gut tightening.
There’s also a quiet brilliance in the single pairing. On the flip side sits “The Boat That I Row”, a song Diamond wrote and recorded as well—later becoming a notable UK hit in another artist’s hands—so the single becomes a small two-panel portrait: one side is the alarm bell (“I Got the Feelin’ (Oh No No)”), the other is persistence and devotion (“The Boat That I Row”). Even without reading it as “conceptual,” you can feel the tension: fear versus faith, suspicion versus commitment—two emotional weather systems printed on the same piece of vinyl.
Listening now, you can also hear the early Diamond identity taking shape: that gift for turning plain speech into melody, that instinct for hooks that feel conversational, that willingness to sound a little exposed. He hadn’t yet become the elder statesman of sing-along anthems. Here he sounds closer to the street—closer to the bright, nervous energy of a young man trying to outrun heartbreak by putting it in time and tune.
And perhaps that’s the deepest meaning of “I Got the Feelin’ (Oh No No)”: it captures a truth we rarely admit proudly—that intuition can be painful, and still correct. Sometimes the heart is the first witness. Sometimes it says “oh no” long before the mind is ready to testify. And when you’re young, especially, that early warning feels like a kind of humiliation: Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t I just not know? Diamond gives that humiliation a rhythm you can tap your foot to—proof that pop music, at its best, doesn’t erase hard feelings. It teaches you how to carry them.
So yes, it peaked at No. 16 and lived among those early Bang singles that built the road ahead. But the real legacy is subtler: for anyone who has ever felt love beginning to tilt—quietly, almost politely—“I Got the Feelin’ (Oh No No)” is still there, like an old friend who doesn’t sugarcoat the weather report, only sings it with you until you’re able to face the sky.