Songfacts®:

• This soaring ballad about the merits of daydreaming was written for the 1972 movie Up The Sandbox, starring Barbra Streisand as a bored housewife who escapes her dull existence through a series of bizarre fantasies. Although it wasn't included in the film, the song was tagged as the movie's theme and released as a radio single in 1973.
• In a 1975 interview with Time magazine, the film's composer, Billy Goldenberg, said he regularly received late-night phone calls from Streisand asking him to hum the next day's music over the line. During one of their 2:30 a.m. chats, she asked him to extend a portion of the score into a song for her to sing - and she wanted it done by 4 p.m.
  
  "I wrote like mad," Goldenberg recalled. "When she called, I hummed her the tune. She liked it, and the next day we got the word writers, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, to fit it out with a lyric."
  
  The song was "If I Close My Eyes" and was distributed for radio airplay in January 1973, a month after the movie's release. Streisand never included it on an album until she released a version featuring her longtime collaborator Michel Legrand on the 1991 compilation, Just For The Record.
• Streisand's subsequent single was also penned by the Bergmans - the chart-topping hit "The Way We Were," the theme song to the 1973 movie of the same name, starring Streisand opposite Robert Redford.
• Streisand spent the early '70s working with producer Richard Perry on a series of contemporary pop albums to broaden her appeal, with Stoney End boasting a title hit by Laura Nyro and Barbra Joan Streisand featuring covers of Carole King's "Where You Lead " and John Lennon's "Mother." She hit her stride in the pop realm, landing seven singles in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 by the end of the decade.
• Prior to Up The Sandbox, Streisand was already a movie star thanks to her roles in Funny Girl (1968), Hello, Dolly! (1969) and What's Up, Doc? (1972), but it was her first movie released through her own production company, Barwood Films (in partnership with the Warner Bros. subsidiary First Artists), which allowed her to have more creative input in her film work. The movie also gave her the chance to test her range as an actress.
  
  "In all my other films, I played characters full of idiosyncrasies, with lots of funny lines," she said (source: Barbra Archives). "In this one, I get back to my beginnings. I don't think I even smile, except at the end. And there are no more than seven funny lines in the whole film. My character is more banal than any I've ever played. This is the most natural role I've had, and so I've had to strive for simplicity. I really want people to think of me as an actress."