Songfacts®:

• After hitting it big with the bittersweet ballad "Looks Like We Made It" on his previous album, Barry Manilow recorded another Richard Kerr/Will Jennings collaboration for Even Now: "Somewhere In The Night." The dramatic number details Manilow's plans for a night of passion.
• A Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (#4 Adult Contemporary), this was the most successful version of the song, but it wasn't the first. In 1975, a couple other acts brought it to the charts, including Helen Reddy at #19 (#2 AC) and Batdorf & Rodney at #69 (#24 AC). Richard Kerr also recorded his own version, and Yvonne Elliman and Kim Carnes also covered it for their respective albums that year.
• In the UK, this was released as a double A-side with "Copacabana (At The Copa)." In the US, it was backed with "Leavin' In The Morning."
• Kerr believes there hasn't been a definitive version yet; he thinks the closest to reach the mark was Batdorf & Rodney, a short-lived folk-rock duo produced by Clive Davis, who was the head of Arista - which also happened to be Manilow's label.
• This was Kerr and Jennings' first collaboration. Kerr initially had no interest in working with the up-and-coming songwriter. The English composer had braved his fear of flying and came to Los Angeles to work with John Bettis, who was known for his work with the Carpenters. But Bettis was busy when he arrived, so Kerr's publisher asked him to meet with Jennings. Kerr was reluctant until he looked over some of the Nashville songwriter's lyrics.
  
  He explained on The Paul Leslie Hour in 2022: "I looked at a few of Will's lyrics - he never had a hit at this stage, he's just come over from Nashville himself - and I looked at some of these lyrics and I just thought, 'This is my sort of lyric. What he writes, it's from the heart, I can write with this guy,' and so we decided to sit down and write together whilst I was waiting for John Bettis."
• Kerr was staying at the Sunset Marquis Hotel on Sunset Boulevard when he came up with the melody. "I rented this electric piano which had three notes missing on it," he told Paul Leslie, "but it didn't matter because it was such a great atmosphere at A&M Records... the old Charlie Chaplin Studios, and if you couldn't write a hit song there, you couldn't write one anywhere."
  
  As for the passionate lyrics, he said they were written with a specific lady in mind, but he didn't divulge who she was.
• On the same trip to Los Angeles where he first met Jennings, Kerr was sitting in his publisher's office when he heard a familiar song coming through the walls: It was Barry Manilow's cover of "Brandy" - a song Kerr wrote with Scott English a few years earlier. Retitled "Mandy," it became Manilow's first hit.
• The album features Paul Shaffer on electric piano. At the time, Shaffer was a member of the Saturday Night Live house band. A few years later, he started his longtime gig as musical director/bandleader on Late Night with David Letterman.
• Manilow was already a huge star in the US, but Even Now, his fifth studio album, marked his breakthrough in the UK. It peaked at #12 on the albums chart - the first of five consecutive releases to make the Top 20.