Micah Diamond is 48, works as a commercial photographer in Los Angeles and is the younger of Neil Diamond’s two sons. Both brothers ended up behind a camera. When their father released Wild at Heart on 8 May this year, the photographs inside the sleeve were credited to Jesse, the elder of the two. Micah is not on the record anywhere.
Nobody in the family has explained that. Jesse posts about his work and his family fairly openly, but his brother has never given an interview about their father, and there is no public comment from him about the family on the record at all.
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Nearly eight years between the brothers
Neil married Marcia Murphey in 1969. He already had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn, from his first marriage to Jayne Posner. Jesse, the first of his two sons with Murphey, was born on 1 May 1970.
At the end of 1972, after finishing a tour of Europe, Neil stopped performing live and stayed off the stage for around 40 months. He wrote, he scored the film Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and he later told the Washington Post that the time off let him “know myself and my family.”
He went back to work in the opening weeks of 1976 with warm up shows in California and Utah, then a tour of Australia and New Zealand, then Las Vegas in July and the Greek Theatre in September. Jesse turned six that May. Neil said years later that his elder son had been playing on stage from the age of six, mostly so he could keep an eye on him while they were on the road.
Micah was born on 14 February 1978, by which point his father was in the busiest years of his working life. A long European tour had run through 1977. The duet version of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers with Barbra Streisand came out in 1978. Filming on The Jazz Singer began in 1980.
Neil has been apologising for that period for most of his adult life. In April 1982, when his younger son was four, he told People magazine that the best thing he could do for his children was to “give them a normal life, be supportive and let them find their own way.” He was still coming back to it on 60 Minutes Australia in February 2020, talking about the tears at home and the guilt he carries about being away more than he should have been.
His brother Harvey told People in 1996 that Neil was there emotionally whenever the children needed him, but that he had gradually stopped noticing what his wife needed. The marriage to Murphey ended in the mid 1990s after roughly 25 years. Micah was finishing high school at the time and enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1996, where he took a degree in communication.
What Micah Diamond does for a living
Jesse studied music and visual arts at CalArts and started a photography business called The Street Studio in 2002. He shoots fine art and street work, has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Germany, and has won awards for it.
Micah set up his own photography company in January 2002. His work is commercial rather than gallery based, and his website still presents him as a working freelance photographer in Los Angeles. There is no biography on that site and no press page. It is nine galleries of pictures, filed under his own headings: Portfolio, Juxtapose, Light, Laugh, Play, Color, Flight, Face and Recent. From September 2009 he also worked as creative director at a company called SchnApps.
In March 2011 the brothers went into business together. Eyeist, set up with a third partner, Allegra Wilde, sold portfolio reviews to photographers anywhere in the world, delivered by working professionals from the photo industry. Jesse was its chief creative officer. Micah is listed as chief operations officer, though his own profile gives the job elsewhere as chief technical officer.
His posts from late that year track the same ground. He linked to the Review Santa Fe portfolio event, to NYCFotoworks, and to a demo of software for sequencing pictures into a running order. He was also shooting a photograph a day at the time and numbering them as he posted. Eyeist ran for about nine years and had wound down by 2020.
The pictures he shot for his father
Between 2009 and 2020, Micah worked on seven of his father’s releases. AllMusic lists the credits as follows.
| Year | Release | Credit |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Hot August Night/NYC | Photography |
| 2014 | Melody Road | Cover photo |
| 2016 | Acoustic Christmas | Art direction |
| 2017 | 50 | Photography director |
| 2018 | Hot August Night III | Art direction |
| 2018 | 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition | Photo research |
| 2020 | Classic Diamonds | Photography |
None of those credits involve singing or songwriting. Music databases tend to inherit an artist’s genre tag onto everyone credited on the record, which is how he ends up filed under pop and rock alongside his father, but nothing in the credit list shows him performing on any of it.
Two days at Abbey Road
Neil came off the road for good after announcing his Parkinson’s diagnosis in January 2018. Two years later the London Symphony Orchestra went into Abbey Road to rebuild fourteen songs from his catalogue, Sweet Caroline among them, as orchestral arrangements. Recording started in February 2020 and ran for eight months. The album became Classic Diamonds.
Neil sent his younger son to London to photograph the sessions, with almost no instructions. He told Forbes that November that he had wanted good pictures which carried the feeling of the record, and that he left the rest to Micah. The front cover went to Ari Michelson and Jesse shot some frames as well, but most of the photography on the album is Micah’s.
What Neil talked about in that interview was not the pictures. Micah stayed at the session for two days while the orchestra worked, and afterwards he wrote his father a letter, which Neil said moved him close to tears because his son had understood what was happening in the room. Neil was 79 at the time and Micah was 42.
“I was just another guy on the radio to him before.”
Micah Diamond’s wife and private life
Not much is known, and a good deal of what circulates online does not hold up. Several websites name a wife and describe a wedding venue in some detail. None of it traces back to a source worth trusting, and nobody in the family has confirmed any of it.
What can be stood up is narrower. He is married, has at least one daughter, and he and his wife have both appeared in family photographs posted by Jesse. Neil has eight grandchildren between his four children.
His own online footprint has barely moved in years. The professional profile still lists Eyeist as a going concern well after the company stopped trading, and his X account has been quiet since 2019.
The question neither brother has answered
Neil turned 85 in January. Wild at Heart, his third album with the producer Rick Rubin, came out in May with Jesse’s photographs inside the sleeve and nothing credited to his brother.
Why one son spent eleven years photographing his father’s records and then stopped, while the other kept going, is not something either of them has talked about publicly. The letter from London is still the only thing the younger brother is known to have said about his father, and nobody outside the family has read it.
