Bread: "Diary" (1972) David Gates [4K] Audio Source: FLAC

Bread: "Diary" (1972) David Gates [4K] Audio Source: FLAC

Here’s a funny but factual take on Bread’s "Diary", the soft-rock tearjerker from their 1972 album Baby I'm-a Want You—a song that’s basically the musical equivalent of peeking into someone’s journal and realizing you’re the side character in your own rom-com.

David Gates, the lead singer and songwriter, came up with the song’s whole “finding a diary under a tree” concept out of thin air—no real diary, no real tree, just pure imagination. He basically wrote a soap opera plot in three minutes, making fans cry over a fictional snoop-fest that sounds like something your nosy aunt would do at a picnic! Gates later admitted he was shocked it became a hit, thinking it was just a “cute little story”—talk about accidentally penning a soft-rock sobfest that’s still melting hearts!

Fun Fact about David Gates

After Bread's heyday in the 1970s, David Gates traded in his soft-rock stardom for a life on the range, buying a sprawling 1,400-acre cattle ranch in northern California where he raised cows and even studied ranching business at a university? It's the ultimate ironic pivot: the guy who crooned buttery-smooth ballads about love and longing like "Make It With You" and "If" ended up knee-deep in manure, milking the dairy dream instead of chasing chart-toppers—proving that sometimes the real "diary" of a musician's life is more moo-sic than melody. Gates embraced the cowboy lifestyle fully, complete with horses and farm equipment, fulfilling a lifelong ambition away from the spotlight, though he occasionally dipped back into music with solo releases like his 1994 country-tinged album Love Is Always Seventeen.