This also marks the first album released by the newly formed MCA Records (a merging of the Uni, Kapp, and Decca labels).

This makes it equal 5th for the most weeks at number 1, tying with Delta Goodrem's 2003 album Innocent Eyes.

[3] In 1996, MCA Managing Director Paul Krige estimated that cumulative sales of Hot August Night in Australia have exceeded one million units.

[10] In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone, music critic Lester Bangs called Hot August Night a "fine presentation of the entire spectrum" of Diamond's work and praised its music as "great, pretentious, goofy pop" with a melodramatic, "hymn-like feeling".

While watching the scene in Laserblast where a corrupted Billy Duncan is killed by an alien, Mike Nelson makes a riff by saying "Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights."