Nights in White Satin

Justin Hayward wrote "Nights in White Satin" at age 19 while touring in Belgium with the Moody Blues, and he titled it after a girlfriend gave him a gift of satin bedsheets. He had written the two verses sitting on the side of a bed, at the end of one love affair and the beginning of another. He later described it as a very personal song in which every word meant something to him.

When he first played it to the band in a rehearsal room, the reaction was mostly indifferent. Then Mike Pinder, who had just acquired a Mellotron, asked to hear it again, and his string-sample riff suddenly made the rest of the group take notice. The song appeared as the segment "The Night" on Days of Future Passed, with the London Festival Orchestra providing accompaniment for the introduction, the final chorus and the closing lament, while the orchestral sounds in the main body came from Pinder's Mellotron.

The first single release in 1967 reached number 19 in the UK and number 103 in the United States. Reissued in 1972, it climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 behind Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" and topped the Cash Box Top 100, becoming the band's most successful American single and earning a gold certification for more than a million copies sold. Drummer Graeme Edge credited that belated success to independent American DJs, starting with a regional breakout in Seattle that spread down to San Francisco and Los Angeles.