Still sparkling: At 67, Diamond still shines in concert

After 40-plus years in the music business, Neil Diamond has sold more than 125 million records worldwide.

He's had 36 Top 40 hits, a Grammy award and a Golden Globe award, but his most recent CD, "Home Before Dark," is his first No. 1 album.

Since its release in May, "Home Before Dark" has sold more than 500,000 copies, becoming a certified gold CD.

Incidentally, with this CD, Diamond, who is 67, became the oldest artist to have a No. 1, surpassing Bob Dylan who was 65 when his CD "Modern Times" hit the Top Spot in 2006.

"Frankly, it came as a surprise to me when I was told that this was my first No. 1," Diamond said during a teleconference with music critics. "I thought I had one or two before this. So, it's nice to have that little milestone. (And) honestly, I never paid much attention to it. It doesn't do any good to have a No. 1 record that stinks. (So) even more important, I was very pleased with the way the album came out."

Diamond praised producer Rick Rubin, who has worked with everyone from Slayer to Metallica to Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for getting "Home Before Dark" to sound the way it does.

"Rick is not the type of producer that's there in your face all the time," said Diamond, who worked with Rubin on his previous CD, "12 Songs," which was released in 2005. "He was more an objective observer, and it was very helpful to everybody."

Diamond gathered a small ensemble of musicians whom he had worked with for most of his career for the sessions.

"We had a great deal in common," he said about the group. "And the setting was very much at ease from the beginning. So it wasn't any kind of thing that we thought out.

"Rick may have wanted to (hark) back to the simpler days of my career when I worked with a five-piece group. He was shooting to capture that in the sessions."

Diamond also said he didn't have a lot of preconceived notions about how the CD was going to sound.

"We were just trying to create something wonderful, something magical and something that had the right chemistry.

"It was very intimate, very close up and it was good," he said. "It was very relaxed, and I didn't get a sense of any pressure to do anything other than trying to realize the song, play it for other musicians and let them in on what I saw the song as."

Diamond said he is playing three songs from the new CD on the tour.