Songfacts®:

• Recorded by Barbra Streisand on Columbia and running 4:10, "Coming In And Out Of Your Life" or "Comin' In And Out Of Your Life" is a previously unreleased track which appeared on Memories, a compilation of (largely) previously recorded material. The sheet music is credited to Richard Parker and Bobby Whiteside.
  
  The song has a special meaning for one woman. On December 9, 1981, Maureen Faulkner's husband Daniel was working the graveyard shift patrolling the streets of Philadelphia. After eating dinner the previous night, he and Maureen went upstairs to get a couple of hours sleep. As she wrote more than two decades later: "We had a clock radio and I'll never forget that, when the radio alarm came on, we were lying in each others arms and Barbra Streisand was singing 'Coming In and Out of Your Life.' That song has never stopped haunting me."
  
  Maureen Faulkner would never see her husband alive again. In the small hours, he was shot dead during the course of a traffic stop. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England
• Streisand's label wanted her to record an album for the holidays, but she was busy in London on pre-production for her directorial debut, Yentl. Instead, she agreed to release a compilation and record a couple new tracks for it - "Coming In And Out Of Your Life" and Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Memory" from the Broadway musical Cats. Both singles were Top 10 hits on the Adult Contemporary chart.
• Although she couldn't devote much time to the project, Streisand made sure the songs she was recording were up to her standards. In this heartache ballad, the singer tries to sever ties with an ex-lover when she realizes it's too painful to keep him in her life, even as a friend. But before she laid down her vocal, she had to work out a few kinks with one of the songwriters.
  
  "She had a few changes she wanted to make in the song," Whiteside is quoted by Barbra Archives. "A couple of line changes. One or two words, nothing major. Just a couple of things she felt a little funny singing - not for any reason other than she needed an explanation. She wanted to know what we meant by a certain line or two. I think I was on the phone with London three or four times while she was recording."
• Whiteside and Parker were a pair of jingle writers who decided to combine their talents and collaborate on a pop song. They knew they had something special after they heard the finished product in the studio. Parker told The Milwaukee Sentinel: "We went into the studio and recorded a very complete demo with string arrangement and everything. Some established artists were interested but we felt the song was just too strong to let go."
  
  Hoping the tune would earn Parker a record deal and launch his singing career, they sent the demo to LA producer Jay Sanders, who happened to be in the process of selecting material for Streisand's album. When he passed the song along to her manager, the rest was history. Even though it didn't fulfill Parker's dreams of becoming a singing star, the song's success with a famous voice had its benefits.
  
  "Having Barbra Streisand do the song automatically legitimized our standing as songwriters," Parker added.
  
  Streisand also recorded the Parker/Whiteside composition "Best I Could" on her 1984 album, Emotion.
• Streisand recorded this at London's CBS Studios in September 1981 with Andrew Lloyd Webber as her producer.
• Memories was the best-selling album of 1982 in the UK, where it was billed as Love Songs, and spent nine weeks overall (seven consecutive) at #1. It was also named British Album of the Year at the 1983 Brit Awards. In the US, where it peaked at #10 on the albums chart, it sold 1 million copies in 1982 (and 5 million by 1998).