All The Time

Album: This One's For You (1976)
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Songfacts®:

  • As Barry Manilow's popularity exploded in the mid-'70s, he started receiving lots of fan mail that shared the same theme: loneliness.

    "It seemed to me that so many people were looking for encouragement and some kind of sign that they weren't alone. My music seemed to be giving comfort and solace to so many strangers. I was touched and humbled by their candor and felt a deep connection with many of them," the singer explained in the liner notes of his 1992 anthology, The Complete Collection And Then Some.

    Manilow knew what it was like to feel lonely - even when he was surrounded by people. The feeling only intensified when he became famous, because he still felt like he didn't fit in. Even his music was hard to categorize. He added: "Although the music I made was becoming enormously popular, no one knew how to classify what it was I was doing Pop? Jazz? Rock? I was a musical misfit too!"

    With that in mind, Manilow asked his songwriting partner Marty Panzer to come up with some lyrics about feeling like a misfit, which resulted in "All The Time."

    "It was the first song I had been involved with that reflected my true feelings. The music came quickly and the record was done in no time with ease," Manilow said. All of us feel alone. But we're not. And it takes creations like 'All The Time' to remind us that we're all one."
  • This was included on Manilow's fourth studio album, This One's For You, which featured the hit singles "Weekend In New England" and "Looks Like We Made It."
  • This was used in the 2000 crime movie Five Seconds To Spare, starring Andy Serkis and Ray Winstone.

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