Spiral Staircase – "More Today Than Yesterday" (1969)

I love you more today than yesterday

But not as much as tomorrow

When I pick my grandson Jack up at day care, I usually sing along to the SiriusXM ’60s on 6 channel during the short drive to his home. 

A few weeks ago, today’s featured song popped up on that station.  Jack isn’t even three years old yet, and I wasn’t sure if the lines from the song that are quoted above would make any sense to him.  

But I started half-saying, half-singing those lines to Jack when I said goodbye after dropping him off at home.  I’m not sure if those lines are really true – do I really love Jack more today that I loved him yesterday? – but I thought it was a nice way to tell him how much I loved him, and might give him something to think about, too.

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Earlier today, my daughter Sarah – Jack’s mother – sent me two short videos of Jack singing to his baby brother Hunter, who just turned six months old.  To say that I was surprised by what Jack did in those videos is the understatement of the century.

Here’s the first video:

Here’s the second one:

(Note how Jack has captured the essential rhythm of these lyrics – the way he pronounces “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” and the pause between the two lines.)

Jack never really reacted to my singing those song lyrics to him – he certainly never sang along with me, or repeated the lines back to me.  

I hadn’t told anyone else about my reciting those lyrics as a goodbye catchphrase.  My daughter had no idea that I was doing that, so she couldn’t have prompted him to sing the lines to Hunter while she recorded him.

Jack has always seemed very taken with little Hunter – he stays pretty close to him when both boys are at home, and I’ve never seen him exhibit any jealousy or resentment when we are paying more attention to Hunter than to him.  But I can’t quite comprehend how his not-quite-three-year-old brain figured out that the song lyrics about love that I recited to him were appropriate for him to sing to his brother.  

I’ve been blessed with four grandsons, and a fifth is on the way – perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to have even more grandchildren in the future.  I have a feeling there are other little miracles like this one in store for me, and I am very much looking forward to them.

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The Spiral Starecase’s “More Today than Yesterday” made it to #12 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1969.  

Pat Upton in 2013

In 2013, the group’s frontman, Pat Upton, talked to a newspaper reporter about writing the song:

I wrote “I Love You More Today Than Yesterday” in a motel room in Las Vegas.  I was thinking about Bobby Goldsboro singing it when I first wrote it.  Musically, I had a chord progression in my head, and I knew the only way I’d ever get to use it was if I wrote a song around it.  [The group recorded the song and] three months later, it took off.

After the Spiral Starecase broke up, Upton became a session musician and a member of Ricky Nelson’s band for a few years.  

On December 30, 1985, Nelson performed at Upton’s club in Guntersville, Alabama.  He was scheduled to play at a big New Year’s Eve show in Dallas, and invited Upton to join them, but Upton declined.  Nelson’s plane – a 40-year-old DC-3 with a history of mechanical problems – crashed about two miles from the airport where it was supposed to land, killing Nelson, his girlfriend, his manager, and all four members of his band.

Here’s a photo of Upton and Nelson taken just before Nelson’s ill-fated flight took off:

Upton died in 2016 at the age of 75.  I wish I had been able to share these videos of Jack with him – he had six grandchildren of his own, so I’m sure he would have enjoyed them.

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In 1889, the 18-year-old Rosemonde Gérard wrote the following lines to Edmond Rostand, a young playwright (he wrote Cyrano de Bergerac) whom she would soon marry:

Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t’aime davantage,

Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier et bien moins que demain.

French poet Rosemonde Gérard

One English-language dictionary of quotations translates those lines as follows:

For, you see, each day I love you more,

Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Years later, a French jeweler came up with the idea of making a medallion engraved with an abbreviated version of the verse.  

The medallion depicted below reads has a plus sign followed by qu’hier, a minus sign, and que demain – in other words, “more than yesterday, less than tomorrow.”

The plus and minus signs on these medallions are often enhanced with gemstones – a romantic poem is all well and good, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

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Click here to listen to “More Today Than Yesterday.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.