“More Today Than Yesterday” was a 1969 hit song released by the pop band Spiral Staircase, who are known as one-hit wonders. The song reached number one on the KHJ Boss Radio survey and No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also made it onto Billboard’s list of Top Hot 100 songs of 1969.
The song was written by Pat Upton, who was also the lead vocalist for the band. According to RebeatMag, when speaking about the creation of the song, Upton said, “I’d had the title ‘More Today than Yesterday’ for a couple of years before I ever wrote the song. I was jamming with a friend, and he showed me a passing chord that I loved. I knew I would never use that chord with the stuff we were doing at the time, and decided the only way was to write a song and use it, and I did. When the chorus came around, those words ‘I love you more today than yesterday’ just fell right into place.”
Candy Kaye, who is the wife of band member Harvey Kaye, said her husband knew they had a hit because, “We were staying at the Bali Hai Motel in Las Vegas, where we were performing as the house band in the Flamingo Sky Room. To test it out, we would play the song just to see if people would dance to it. Every time we played it, people would ask who originally did the song and where could they get it, so we knew we had a hit on our hands.”
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Unfortunately, the group wasn’t doing well when the song came out. “We were breaking up and were not together as a band when ‘More Today Than Yesterday’ came out and became a hit,” Upton said. But then “‘More Today Than Yesterday’ started playing on the radio and everybody jumped back on board.”
Unfortunately, the band broke up about 18 months after the release of the song, around 1970.
Upton died in 2016 at the age of 75.