who first sang i'll never fall in love again
I'll Never Fall in Love Again In the fall of 1968 Bacharach and David were in Boston for previews of Promises, Promises, the new musical for which producer David Merrick had asked if they would write the score, and Merrick realized, "'We're missing a song in the middle of the second act, and what we need is something the audience can whistle on their way out of the theater.'"[4] But around this time, Bacharach was hospitalized with pneumonia and wasn't able to sit at a piano to write the music until after he was released. By that time "Hal had already come up with the lyrics to 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again,' and my hospital stay had inspired him to write, 'What do you get when you kiss a girl? / You get enough germs to catch pneumonia / After you do, she'll never phone you.'"[5] When he finally sat with the lyrics in front of him, he recalls, "I wrote the melody for 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again' faster than I had ever written any song in my life."[4] The surge of creativity paid off. "We came in with the song the next morning, and it went into the show a couple of nights later. 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again' became the outstanding hit from the score and pretty much stopped the show every night."[4] Promises, Promises had its Broadway premiere on December 1 of that year,[6] and the song was originally performed as a duet between the characters played by Jill O'Hara and Jerry Orbach as they ruminate on the various troubles that falling in love brings. They recorded it for the original Broadway cast album.[7]