About The Song
“Going in Circles” has an origin that’s easy to miss if you only know it as a Three Dog Night album track. Songwriter Ted Myers has said he wrote it in 1972 specifically for the film X, Y & Zee (starring Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine). The film’s own music credits list the song under Myers and Jaiananda, performed by Three Dog Night under Richard Podolor’s supervision—so it wasn’t just “a song they found,” it was tied to a real screen project from the start.
Myers’ path to that moment is part of the story. In an interview about his early years, he described moving to California in 1969 and signing a publishing deal with Tree Music. A few years later, that pipeline produced “Going in Circles,” which he noted ended up with Three Dog Night and then spread much further than the movie itself—because the band’s records sold in the millions. On his own site, Myers even frames the track’s footprint in “records sold” terms, pointing out how quickly one placement could multiply once a major band cut it.
Three Dog Night recorded it for Seven Separate Fools, released in July 1972. The album was a peak moment for them: it reached No. 6 on the Billboard 200 and famously shipped with seven oversized playing cards tucked into the LP package. “Going in Circles” sits inside a sequence of songs that shows how wide their net was—Randy Newman and Allen Toussaint on the same record—yet this one carries a different kind of backstory because it arrived with a film credit attached.
What really helped the song travel, though, was a single. In March 1972, Dunhill released “The Family of Man” as a 45, and “Going in Circles” was put on the B-side. “The Family of Man” became a sizable hit (Top 20 in the U.S.), meaning plenty of people owned the record even if they didn’t know they were also buying a movie-linked track on the flip. That was one of the quiet advantages of the era: B-sides could become their own discovery channel.
Inside the band, the song also fits their signature approach—shared vocal identity instead of one fixed frontman. Seven Separate Fools credits list all three lead singers (Danny Hutton, Chuck Negron, and Cory Wells) as lead voices on “Going in Circles,” which matches how Three Dog Night often “cast” songs: the right voice for the right line, then the blend doing the branding.
They didn’t leave it in the studio, either. When they issued the double live album Around the World with Three Dog Night in February 1973, “Going in Circles” made the set list. That’s a practical endorsement: if a song survives the jump to a live album, it usually means it worked in the room, not just on tape.
So “Going in Circles” ends up being a small map of how material moved in the early ’70s—song written for a film, picked up by a hit band, pressed onto a B-side of a successful single, placed on a blockbuster-selling album, and then proven again onstage. The movie credit may be the starting point, but Three Dog Night’s machinery is what turned it into something listeners kept running into.
Video
Lyric
Going in circles, don’t really know
Where I have come from, where I will go
You say that you love me, and maybe you do
There’s nothing that matters or anything new
I’ve been through a million trips in the night
Living with shadows, looking for light
And passing the faces, how lonely they seem
Looking for traces of yesterdays dream
Going in circles, been here before
Never expected anything more
Might die tomorrow, I might go to Spain
Dumb to the sorrow, numb to the pain
Circles.
Going in circles.
Circles.