Songfacts®:

• In "Diamond Girl," the jazz-influenced title track of Seals & Crofts' fifth studio album, the soft-rock duo sings about their love for a charismatic woman whose inner light shines like a precious gem stone wherever she goes.
• The album is a follow-up to their breakthrough release, Summer Breeze, whose title hit boasted a memorable mandolin and bass riff. On Diamond Girl, Seals & Crofts beefed up their band with future Toto founders David Paich (organ, piano) and Jeff Porcaro (drums), among other studio luminaries. Jimmy Seals, however, felt the core duo got a bit lost in the shuffle of a bigger band, which stifled their musical identity.
  
  "After Summer Breeze hit, somewhere in between there and the recording of Diamond Girl, we realized that we could not progress any further... we were very limited as to the kind of music we could play," he told Goldmine Magazine in 1992.
  
  "But there was no way that we could play anything any harder. If you're playing with a band, all of a sudden you're in competition with 10,000 other bands. The band has got to really cook, and it's got to have an identity. And for the crowd that we were playing, it had to be hard rock. I feel like we lost a little bit of uniqueness in what we were doing, because we started leaning more and more on the band."
• This matched the chart positions of "Summer Breeze," peaking at #6 on the Hot 100 and #4 on the Adult Contemporary chart. They hit the Top 10 one more time with "Get Closer" in 1976 (again peaking at #6).
• Along with many of their other hits, Seals & Crofts re-recorded this for their 2004 reunion album, Traces. It also shows up on the compilations Greatest Hits (1975) and The Seals & Crofts Collection (1979).
• This was featured on the soundtrack to the 2021 movie Licorice Pizza, which is set in 1973.
• This was also used in the first episode of the 2014 miniseries Olive Kitteridge, titled "Pharmacy."
• Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx has fond memories of listening to this with his girlfriend in the summer of 1973 when he was a teenager. He tried to convince the band to record it when they were looking for a cover tune for their Theatre Of Pain album in 1985, but they shot him down because it didn't sound like a rock song. Instead, they landed their first Top 40 hit with their take on Brownsville Station's "Smokin' In The Boy's Room."
  
  But years later, he still has his first pick on the brain. He noted in his 2021 autobiography, The First 21: How I Became Nikki Sixx, "I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I stuck to my guns and insisted on 'Diamond Girl.'"
• Former Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks recorded this for his ninth solo album, Slick (1977).