Today’s classic song of the day is another one co-written by Paul Williams, this time with frequent collaborator Roger Nichols. (Paul did the words, Roger did the music.) The song is “We’ve Only Just Begun” and it was a huge hit for the Carpenters.
Paul and Roger wrote “We’ve Only Just Begun” as a commercial jingle for California’s Crocker National Bank. Richard Carpenter saw the commercial on TV, found out that Williams wrote it, and appropriated it for his sister Karen to sing.
Here’s what Paul Williams remembers about the song:
“‘It had all the romantic beginnings of a bank commercial’ is the way I describe it. There was actually a wonderful writer named Tony Asher who wrote for this ad agency, and he’d had a skiing accident and he broke his arm, so he couldn’t write or play the piano or whatever. So he suggested Roger Nichols and I as replacements to write this ad. The ad agency called us and said, ‘Look, we’re going to show a young couple getting married, driving off into the sunset, and it’s going to say, ‘You’ve got a long way to go, we’d like to help you get there to the Crocker Bank.” And I went, Okay, what rhymes with Crocker? Crocker what? And they said very specifically, ‘No we don’t want a jingle.’ What they asked for is what we would today call a music video. It was going to show a young couple getting married, driving off into the sunset. After the ceremony, the first kiss and all. So Roger and I wrote the song that would play over that.
“We wrote the first two verses of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.’ We wrote a second version of the commercial that was a verse, and what became the bridge. We added a third verse just in case anybody would ever want to record it. And then I assumed that it would never, ever get cut again. Richard (Carpenter), I guess, heard me singing it on the TV commercial, and called and asked if there was a complete song. And we went, ‘Well, funny you should ask.’ And if there hadn’t been a complete song, we would have lied and said, ‘Well, of course there is,’ and then sat down and written it. You know, songwriting in those days was like that, too.”
Released in August of 1970, “We’ve Only Just Begun” went to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, #1 on the Cash Box Top 100, and #1 on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart. (It was also a #1 hit in Canada.) Instrumental backing was provided by Joe Osborn (bass) and Hal Blaine (drums), with Richard Carpenter himself playing keyboards. (No, Karen didn’t play drums on her own recordings; they called in Hal Blaine, the studio pro, ,for that.) The result, featuring Karen’s silky smooth vocals and the siblings’ overdubbed vocal harmonies (arranged by Richard) was sublime—and, in 1998, inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
And here’s your daily bonus video of the day, Karen Carpenter and her brother Richard performing “We’ve Only Just Begun” live in 1971. Damn, she was a fine singer. Did anybody else have a voice like hers?
