Songfacts®:

• Here, Dion sings about a relationship struggling to heal. She has a past that's shrouded in mystery or pain and he wants to see the spark return to his partner's eyes. Dion acknowledges the difficulty of moving forward and offers unwavering support.
• Dion recorded "Only You Know" for his 14th solo album, Born to Be with You. It was one of several tracks overseen by the infamous Phil Spector, the architect of the "Wall of Sound," a production technique that basically involved throwing every instrument ever invented at a song and hoping for the best.
• Fun fact: both Dion and Phil Spector hailed from the Bronx, and both had their breakout hits in 1958, Spector with "To Know Him Is To Love Him" by The Teddy Bears, Dion with "I Wonder Why."
• By the 1970s, Dion's rock n' roll reign was fading, and Spector wasn't exactly the hit-making machine he once was. Enter Warner Bros. Records, who decided to give Dion another shot. They gave him a box of potential collaborators and asked him who he wanted to work with. Spector, with a nostalgic glint in his eye, remembered Dion's doo-wop days with The Belmonts and plumped for him. "Only You Know" was the first song he gave Dion to record.
  
  "When I went up to the house the first time, his castle, he opened the door and didn't say hello, he just started singing the whole song to me there in the foyer," recalled Dion to Uncut magazine. "That's how that album started. He wrote that song with Gerry Goffin and gave it to me."
• In trademark style, Spector included three drummers, three bass players, umpteen guitarists and, of course, the obligatory horns and strings.
  
  "I knew Phil from the Brooklyn Fox Theater days, when he wore a cape and carried a cane," said Dion. "He was a real exhibitionist. It was amazing being with the guy in those sessions and singing 'Only You Know' or 'Born To Be With You' or 'In and Out of the Shadows,' looking at the control room and there's Bruce Springsteen or Sonny and Cher. There were so many people in the control room who wanted to come and watch the sessions, to watch Phil's Spector at work."
• Spector, ever the maverick, shelved the album for a year. When it finally did see the light of day in 1975, the music press met Born to Be with You with indifference. However, in the 1990s, the album began to receive widespread critical acclaim as artists like Pete Townshend and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream proclaimed its brilliance.
• Arctic Monkeys recorded an acoustic cover of "Only You Know" during a session for WRXP in 2009.