“Cherish” by The Association

Terry Kirkman needed about half an hour to write "Cherish" at his parents' home in Chino, California, and the Association released it on Valiant in August 1966 as the follow-up to "Along Comes Mary", with Curt Boettcher producing. Kirkman had caught somebody using the word earlier that same evening, liked the tender, loving ring of it, and hung his lyric on it, chasing the kind of slow, emotional ballad the Righteous Brothers had made of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'".

The record is all hush and yearning, a slow-dance sigh for the transistor generation. It held number one in America for three weeks that September, topped the chart in Canada too, and went gold before the year was out. Billboard first rated it the seventh-biggest record of 1966, then bumped it to second when it revised its year-end rankings.

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