“Summerlove” is Neil Diamond writing sunlight with a shadow behind it—an 80s postcard where romance feels real precisely because you already know it can’t last forever.
The most important thing to know about “Summerlove” is where it lives and why it exists: it’s track 7 on Neil Diamond’s soundtrack album The Jazz Singer (Original Songs From The Motion Picture), released in November 1980 (widely dated to November 10, 1980 on major music metadata). The song is credited to Neil Diamond and Gilbert Bécaud, one of the key creative pairings on the project, and the orchestral arrangement for the piece is credited to Tom Hensley. Importantly, “Summerlove” was not released as a standalone single, so it does not have an official singles-chart debut position of its own. Its “chart life” is carried by the album that surrounds it.
And what an album that was. The Jazz Singer became Diamond’s biggest-selling album in the United States, selling over 5 million copies there, and it reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop albums chart (Billboard 200 peak dated February 7, 1981, as documented by Billboard). It also produced three towering hits—“Love on the Rocks” (No. 2), “Hello Again” (No. 6), and “America” (No. 8) on the Billboard Hot 100—songs that pulled the soundtrack into everyday life far beyond the film itself.
The story behind the soundtrack is a classic example of music outrunning its vehicle. The album served as the soundtrack to the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, and it was released on Capitol (not Diamond’s then-usual Columbia) because the film was produced by EMI Films, tied to Capitol’s corporate family. The film’s reception was famously harsh—Diamond even received the first Razzie for Worst Actor—yet the soundtrack flourished, the songs doing what songs sometimes do: surviving the reviews by speaking directly to the public’s private feelings. Producer credit goes to Bob Gaudio, adding a sleek, contemporary pop sheen to Diamond’s storytelling instincts.
Within that glossy, hit-studded context, “Summerlove” is not the loud centerpiece—it’s the warm side-street you remember later. Co-written with Bécaud, it carries a particular kind of romantic motion: not the grand declaration of forever, but the gentler illusion of “for now,” sung with enough tenderness that you almost forgive it for being temporary. The title itself is a small heartbreak. It doesn’t say “love.” It says “Summerlove”—a love with a season stitched into it, a built-in ending you can already feel in the late-afternoon light.
That is the deeper meaning of the song: pleasure that knows it’s borrowed. The best “summer love” songs don’t pretend time stands still; they celebrate the sweetness because the sweetness won’t stay. Diamond’s voice, by 1980, had that unmistakable mix of authority and longing—he sounds like a man who has lived through enough goodbyes to recognize one approaching, even while he’s still smiling. And with Tom Hensley handling the orchestral framing, the track gains a subtle cinematic lift—strings and arrangement choices that suggest memory at work: polishing the edges, softening the hard parts, making the past glow a little warmer than it probably felt in real time.
So “Summerlove” endures as a kind of emotional interlude inside a blockbuster soundtrack. It doesn’t chase the Top 10 the way the big singles do; it settles into the listener’s quieter places. It’s the song you put on when you’re not trying to relive youth exactly—only to remember, for a few minutes, how it felt to believe the season might last a little longer than it ever does.