Reason to Believe

Hardin wrote both words and music; Wikipedia says it was first recorded in 1965 and released on Tim Hardin 1 in July 1966, but the album sessions ran across 1964 and 1965 and no source pins this track. American Songwriter describes a melancholy ballad about a narrator who may again fall for a deceptive woman; we found no Hardin quote about it. The studio version is 2:00 on the album and 1:57 on Hang On to a Dream, and it is on the soundtrack of the 2000 film Wonder Boys. The live version at the Town Hall in 1968 runs 2:42 (track two of Tim Hardin 3 Live in Concert), and the Eugene homecoming in 1980 has a 2:37 version. He played it fourth in his Woodstock set in August 1969.

The Carpenters recorded it in 1970 for Close to You, with Karen Carpenter singing lead. Rod Stewart closed Every Picture Tells a Story (May 28, 1971, recorded at Morgan Studios in London) with it, and it was released as a single in July 1971 with "Maggie May" on the B-side; the B-side took over and the double-sided single reached number one in the UK and spent five weeks at the top of the Hot 100, with the "Reason to Believe" side alone peaking at 62 in the US. Stewart's 1993 live version from Unplugged...and Seated reached 19 on the Hot 100 and three in Canada. Others who recorded it include Karen Dalton, the Youngbloods, Bobby Darin, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Marianne Faithfull and Peter, Paul and Mary. Setlist.fm lists it ten times. We cannot say which version our upload is.