“Day Dreaming” by Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin wrote "Day Dreaming" on her own, and it drifted out of her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black on Atlantic as a soul single. She sings and plays piano, and the band is stacked: Donny Hathaway on electric piano, Hubert Laws on alto flute, Cornell Dupree and Don Arnone on guitars, Chuck Rainey on bass and Bernard "Pretty" Purdie on drums, with Carolyn and Erma Franklin among the backing voices. Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin produced it.

On the album a jazzy daydream passage frames the song; the single dropped it, since the vocals there were judged too psychedelic for radio. It ruled the soul chart for two weeks, reached number five on the Hot 100 and sold over a million. People long whispered that it was about the Temptations' Dennis Edwards, and in 1999 Franklin confirmed it on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.