“One More Bite of the Apple” is a late-life spark of defiance and renewal—Neil Diamond insisting that the sweetest chances often come after the world thinks you’ve had your share.
By the time Neil Diamond delivered “One More Bite of the Apple,” he was singing with the seasoned certainty of a man who had already lived through every kind of triumph and reinvention—and still had the nerve to ask for more. The song appears on his studio album Home Before Dark, produced by Rick Rubin and released on May 6, 2008. On the album’s official sequence, “One More Bite of the Apple” is track 5, and it stretches to 6:39, giving Diamond room to let the idea breathe, circle back, and deepen rather than rushing to a chorus for quick applause. The composition credit is clean and direct—composed by Neil Diamond—which matters, because the emotional argument of this song feels unmistakably personal.
If you’re looking for the “ranking at launch,” this is where the story becomes almost cinematic. Home Before Dark debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, giving Diamond the first No. 1 album of his career, and Billboard reported an opening week of 146,000 units in the U.S. It’s hard not to feel the poetry in that: an artist whose voice had scored decades of American life finally arriving at the chart summit not by getting louder, but by getting closer. And inside that triumph sits “One More Bite of the Apple,” not as a single (it was not released as a single, and therefore has no individual chart position), but as a deep-album statement—an interior chapter meant to be lived with.
The world around this song is crucial. Rick Rubin’s approach on Home Before Dark is famously about stripping away varnish—leaving the woodgrain, the breath, the human edges. In that kind of production light, Diamond doesn’t sound like a legend posing as himself; he sounds like a man telling you the truth over a late-night kitchen table. That intimacy makes the title phrase—one more bite—feel less like indulgence and more like a philosophy. Not greed. Not nostalgia. A stubborn appetite for life, even after life has already taken its share.
And that’s the emotional story “One More Bite of the Apple” carries: the idea of second chances without naïveté. It isn’t the youthful belief that everything will work out because it always does. It’s the older, harder belief that you can still choose hope even when you know exactly how things can fall apart. The song moves with a kind of rolling confidence—restless, forward-leaning—yet it’s haunted by experience in the best way: not a shadow that dims the light, but a shadow that proves the light is real.
There’s also something quietly biblical in the metaphor. “The apple” is temptation, knowledge, consequence—the moment after innocence. Diamond doesn’t sing as if he’s trying to return to Eden. He sings as if he already understands the cost of tasting life fully… and still, he wants another taste. That’s what makes it so human. Many songs about renewal pretend the past can be erased. This one suggests the opposite: that the past is exactly what gives the present its flavor.
Placed where it is—midway through Home Before Dark—the song feels like a hinge in the album’s emotional architecture. The record is full of late-career candor, and “One More Bite of the Apple” stands as a burst of momentum within that candor: an insistence that reflection doesn’t have to mean retreat. You can look back and still reach forward. You can carry your years and still say, with a straight face and a beating heart, not yet.
That is the lingering meaning of Neil Diamond’s “One More Bite of the Apple.” It’s the sound of refusing to be finished. Not with love, not with desire, not with the messy, radiant business of living. And maybe that’s why it fits so naturally on the album that finally went #1—because both the song and the record tell the same story in different languages:
When the world expects you to settle for memories, you choose one more mouthful of the present.