Songfacts®:

• In this moving song from his 13th studio album, Barry Manilow promises to stand by a friend who's going through a hard time. It was written by American singer-songwriter Mindy Sterling, who tried to comfort her hurting friend the only way she knew how - through music. So she wrote this song. Or maybe it was the other way around.
  
  "I didn't write 'Please Don't Be Scared.' It wrote me!" she insisted in the liner notes to Manilow's 1992 anthology, The Complete Collection And Then Some. "A dear, dear, friend of mine - someone known for keeping her cool in most traumas - completely fell apart one day on the phone. Her pain was so real to me, but I felt helpless I couldn't console her. When I got off the phone, I went directly to the piano and wrote the first chorus and verse."
• Sterling sang this as a present to her friend at one of her shows, but she never intended for it to be published for someone else to record. In retrospect, she's grateful that Manilow was able to bring it to a wider audience. She said, "But to be honest, in giving it away, it seems so many other people get a gift too. I got to be the channel."
• Manilow called this "one of the most affecting songs I've ever been associated with." He continued, "I told Mindy Sterling that I was sure that she was given the gift of songwriting so that she could write this. The message and melody have helped many people and seem to have come from a very high place."
• This was released as the album's second single. It didn't make any of the charts in the US but reached the Top 40 in the UK.
• Manilow performed this at the Warwick Foundation's benefit concert That's What Friends Are For: AIDS Concert '88, which was held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
• By the end of the decade, Manilow's albums weren't doing nearly as well commercially. The self-titled release petered out at #64 in the US and didn't earn any certifications aside from Silver in the UK (for 60,000 copies sold). But his next album, Because It's Christmas, sold 1 million copies in the US, and set him on the path of recording mostly cover tunes in the next phase of his career.