Day Dreaming (Aretha Franklin song)

"Day Dreaming"
One of Side-A labels of US vinyl single
Single by Aretha Franklin
from the album Young, Gifted and Black
B-side"I've Been Loving You Too Long"
ReleasedFebruary 1972
GenreSoul[1]
Length4:00
2:41 (7" version)
LabelAtlantic
Songwriter(s)Aretha Franklin
Producer(s)Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin, Jerry Wexler
Aretha Franklin singles chronology
"Rock Steady"
(1971)
"Day Dreaming"
(1972)
"All the King's Horses"
(1972)

"Day Dreaming" is a soul single by American singer Aretha Franklin. Released from her album Young, Gifted and Black, it spent two weeks at the top of the Hot Soul Singles chart in April 1972 and peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 11 on the Easy Listening singles chart.[2] Billboard ranked it as the No. 61 song for 1972.[3]

Donny Hathaway plays electric piano on the song and Hubert Laws plays the flute. The single version omits the jazzy daydream-like music heard at the beginning and the ending of the track on the album, because the vocals sounded too psychedelic for most radio airplay. It had been rumored the song was about Temptations' singer Dennis Edwards, which was confirmed by Franklin in 1999 on The Oprah Winfrey Show.[4] It would be her twelfth number-one soul single while at Atlantic Records and sold more than one million copies.

  1. ^ Breithaupt, Don; Breithaupt, Jeff (October 15, 1996). "Love American Style: Ballads". Precious and Few - Pop Music in the Early '70s. St. Martin's Griffin. p. 163. ISBN 031214704X.
  2. ^ Whitburn, Joel (2004). Top R&B/Hip-Hop Singles: 1942-2004. Record Research. p. 215.
  3. ^ Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1972
  4. ^ "Aretha Franklin talking about Dennis Edwards".