Richard Carpenter: "Well every now and again we used steel guitar because I thought it worked so well for Karen's voice. We'd used it on earlier things we did, and I should have used it in 'Reason To Believe' but I didn't think of it at the time. 'Top Of The World' has quite an interesting story surrounding it. It's odd. It was written by one kid from San Pedro (Bettis) and another one from Downey and it's a country song, but when we finished it for the 'A Song For You' album in 1972, all of us thought 'It's an album cut', and we were proved so wrong, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, when we performed it in concert, it got an ovation from the crowd as if it were one of our biggest hits. The Japanese culled it from the LP and released it as a single and it went gold. Lynn Anderson covered it, almost to the note, and it went to Number One in the country chart. Certain stations in the United States were charting it, based on requests alone. We had kids coming to our parents' home asking when it was going to be made into a small record. So we decided it was time to release it as a single. A&M wasn't all that happy about putting it out, so they kind of talked us out of it. Time went by and it just didn't let up, the requests for it and all, and we ultimately did a little alteration to it. We redid the lead, because Karen thought she could sing it better, and I was never totally happy with the steel guitar on the album. So we did the steel guitar over and then Tony (Peluso) came in and did a little guitar work on it, and then we remixed it. And, of course, it went to Number One in all three trade papers in the States and it was a smash."