Done Too Soon

Content

"Done Too Soon" is a song of mortality, divided, stylistically, into two sections, a fast-paced first part and a slower, more introspective second part.

Lyrics

The lyrics of "Done Too Soon" drop the following names, in order, in its fast-paced first part:

1. Jesus Christ, central figure of Christianity
2. Fanny Brice, American stage, screen, and radio comedian, subject of "Funny Girl"
3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer
4. Humphrey Bogart, American actor
5. Genghis Khan, Mongolian military-political conqueror-adventurer
6. H. G. Wells, British Victorian-era science-fiction writer
7. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese Communist leader
8. Gunga Din, title character of the Rudyard Kipling poem
9. Henry Luce, American publisher, founder of Time Magazine
10. John Wilkes Booth, American actor, assassin of Abraham Lincoln
11. Alexander the Great
12. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone
13. Ramakrishna, Indian mystic
14. Anna Whistler, mother of American-born painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, as he immortalized her in "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1"
15. Patrice Lumumba, Congolese independence leader and first democratically elected prime minister, assassinated
16. Russ Colombo, American baritone ("You Call it Madness but I Call it Love") and songwriter ("Too Beautiful for Words")
17. Karl Marx, German philosopher, author of The Communist Manifesto
18. Chico Marx, American comedy actor, one of the Marx Brothers
19. Albert Camus, French philosopher and author, contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism
20. Edgar Allan Poe, American writer of poetry and macabre; inventor of the mystery story.
21. Henri Rousseau, French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner
22. Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish humorist and playwright, one of the founders of modern Yiddish literature
23. Caryl Chessman, American criminal, first person executed for a non-lethal kidnapping. Case led campaign to end capital punishment in California.
24. Alan Freed, American disc jockey, credited with creating the term "rock and roll."
25. Buster Keaton, American silent-films actor

The slower, more introspective second part notes the commonalities between these twenty-five individuals. (Even though Gunga Din was a fictional character, he is listed with the other twenty-four because his name fits the syllabic count of the lyrics.) Those commonalities are these, as quoted from the lyrics:

In this context, "being done too soon" means that all those whom Diamond identifies died before each of their times, with their lives's respective work unfinished, or both.

Music

The music of "Done Too Soon," which Diamond composed for his own baritone range, is in the key of A major.

The first couplets of each of the first part's two halves range in tone from A3 to A2, and the second couplets are primarily in the tone of Ab3, but these latter couplets each rise to a single B3 note before returning to A3.

The second part starts with a couplet whose two lines have the tones E1-D2-D2-B2, and in toto, its music is almost elegiac in sound.

History

As of April 2015, the story of how Diamond had come to write and compose "Done Too Soon" was not clear.

Chart performance

"Done Too Soon" did not truly chart, because Diamond never actually released it as a single.

Notable cover versions

Also as of April 2015, "Done Too Soon" was not known to have been interpreted by any other artists than Diamond himself.