By admin 
Introduction
The spotlight can blind you, but it can never keep you warm at night. In the pantheon of American music legends, few smiles are as recognizable as Barry Manilow’s—that blinding beam of showmanship that has sold over 85 million records. But look closer. Listen harder. Beneath the sequins, the Copacabana showgirls, and the commercial jingles lies a deep, oceanic well of melancholy that suggests a wound that never quite healed. For years, fans have wept to the soaring, tragic crescendo of his 1978 masterpiece, “Even Now,” assuming it was just another generic tale of heartbreak. They were wrong.
This isn’t just a song; it is a crime scene of the heart.
To understand the shattering weight of “Even Now,” we have to rewind the tape to 1964 in Brooklyn, New York. Before the fame, before the frenzy, there was just Barry and a girl named Susan Deixler. She was his high school sweetheart, the “perfect wife” by his own admission—beautiful, supportive, and deeply in love. They married young, two kids against the world. But Barry heard a different calling. The music wasn’t just a hobby; it was a jealous mistress demanding his absolute, undivided soul. Just one year into the marriage, consumed by a “monstrous” ambition to make it in the music industry, Barry did the unthinkable. He walked away. He abandoned the perfect girl not because he didn’t love her, but because he loved the piano more.
For decades, the narrative was that Barry was simply “married to his music.” But when “Even Now” dropped, it felt like the confession booth had been thrown wide open. The lyrics paint a devastating picture of a man who has achieved everything he thought he wanted—success, distraction, a new life—yet is paralyzed by the memory of the one he left behind. When Manilow sings about “breaking down” in the middle of the night, it resonates with the specific, gnawing guilt of a man who knows he is the villain of his own love story.
Critics and biographers have long speculated that while the lyrics were penned by Marty Panzer, the emotional delivery was pure, unadulterated autobiography from Manilow. It is the sound of a man realizing that the applause of thousands cannot silence the silence of an empty house. The tragedy of Susan Deixler isn’t that she was forgotten; it’s that she was immortalized in a song about how impossible she is to forget. Even as Manilow eventually found his truth and long-term partnership later in life, the “Susan Chapter” remains the original sin of his rise to stardom—the human sacrifice made at the altar of fame. When you listen to “Even Now” today, you aren’t hearing a pop star perform; you are hearing a ghost apologize to the past.