Years before Terry Jacks took “Seasons in the Sun” to No. 1, he tried to make the melancholy song work with one of California’s most famous bands.
In 1970, Jacks produced a recording of “Seasons in the Sun” for The Beach Boys, but the group ultimately abandoned the track. Jacks later returned to the song himself, recording the version that became a worldwide smash in 1974 and the defining hit of his solo career.
The song’s history stretched back even further.
“Seasons in the Sun” was adapted from “Le Moribond,” a French-language song by Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. American poet and songwriter Rod McKuen subsequently wrote English lyrics, and The Kingston Trio recorded an early English-language version in 1963.
Jacks encountered the song before launching his solo career. The Canadian musician had found success with The Poppy Family, the group he formed with his then-wife, Susan Jacks, but his involvement with The Beach Boys gave “Seasons in the Sun” an unexpected detour.
“A really good friend of mine died, he had acute leukemia,” Jacks told Songfacts. “He was gone in four months. He was a very good friend of mine, one of my best friends, and he said I was the first one that he told. I remembered this song of an old man dying of a broken heart, and I liked some of the melody and there was something there. I rewrote the song about him and how he said goodbye to his friend and then he said goodbye to his father instead of his priest, and then he said goodbye to his girlfriend.”
In the summer of 1970, Jacks produced The Beach Boys as they attempted the song during sessions in California. The recording was left unfinished and remained unreleased for decades, eventually surfacing on the band’s 2021 archival collection Feel Flows.
Jacks wasn’t ready to leave the song behind.
He recorded his own rendition in Vancouver in 1973, altering the material and surrounding its farewell lyrics with a bright, almost deceptively cheerful arrangement.
“I felt it when I sang it,” he said in an interview with The Early Edition. “It was kind of a first take. I could relate to a lot of it through things that had happened to me in my life and friends.”
Jacks initially released it through his own Goldfish Records, before the single received wider distribution.
The decision changed his career.
“Seasons in the Sun” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1974 and remained there for three weeks. It also topped charts in Canada and the U.K., while Billboard ultimately ranked it as the No. 2 song of 1974. Despite releasing other successful records in his native Canada, Jacks never again approached its level of American success.
Fifty-two years later, “Seasons in the Sun” remains inseparable from Terry Jacks. Yet one of the decade’s most recognizable soft rock hits might have sounded very different: its path to No. 1 began years earlier, when Jacks brought the song into the studio with The Beach Boys in California.
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