{"id":14850,"date":"2018-07-13T05:30:05","date_gmt":"2018-07-13T09:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=14850"},"modified":"2018-07-13T08:37:37","modified_gmt":"2018-07-13T12:37:37","slug":"paul-williams-someday-and-today-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/07\/13\/paul-williams-someday-and-today-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Williams: “Someday” and Today (Part 4)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Continued from Part Three<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n

Another characteristic of Paul Williams\u2019 lyrics is their universal quality. Listening to or reading his words, the thoughts and emotions expressed could as easily be coming from a female as from a male. Williams doesn\u2019t dispute that characterization, saying that his lyrics often display \u201can androgynous, one-size-fits-all heartache. I will always jokingly refer to my songs as co-dependent anthems,\u201d he adds with a chuckle. \u201cI wasn\u2019t hip enough to know that a man just doesn\u2019t say things like that! So I started writing all these needy songs, but generally with the positive break in there, somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would be only about a year between the release of Someday Man<\/i> and Williams\u2019 second solo album, Just An Old Fashioned Love Song<\/i>. The latter contains several tunes that would become very well-known. The title track had been written for the Carpenters, but pianist Richard Carpenter rejected it; Three Dog Night recorded it instead, scoring a #1 hit single on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart.<\/p>\n

The Carpenters did accept another tune from Williams, \u201cWe\u2019ve Only Just Begun.\u201d While the earliest recording of the song was in the form of a television commercial for a bank, it would be the Carpenters\u2019 worldwide smash (#1 U.S., Australia and Canada; #28 UK) that would establish the tune as a standard. Another song from Williams\u2019 second album, \u201cLet Me Be the One\u201d would be a popular track on the Carpenters\u2019 self-titled third album. By the time of Just An Old Fashioned Love Song<\/i>, it seemed that everything Paul Williams wrote turned to gold.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, Nichols and Williams also wrote \u201cRainy Days and Mondays\u201d (#2 U.S.) for Carpenters<\/i>, but Williams wouldn\u2019t record and release his own version of the song until 1974\u2019s Here Comes Inspiration<\/i>, his fourth album. That song\u2019s lyrics are mostly melancholy, but that positive turn Williams describes makes an appearance: \u201c\u2019Funny but it seems I always wind up here with you \u2026 and nice to know somebody loves me,\u2019\u201d he says, quoting his own lyric. \u201cSo somehow there\u2019s a positivism,\u201d he says, adding with a laugh, \u201cThere is very little \u2018truck and shotgun\u2019 in the songs that I write.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet another distinctive feature of Williams\u2019 writing style is its personal nature. The feelings and ideas expressed in his words are general enough to apply to a wide variety of listeners, yet somehow specific enough to allow anyone who wishes to take them personally and feel that they express the very things that they feel.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that what I wrote was a response to the world around me and how I fit in it \u2026 or didn\u2019t fit in it,\u201d he says. He recalls playing one of his songs for a girlfriend. \u201cHer head was going left and right, like \u2018Nuh-uh; we\u2019re not going out tonight.\u2019\u201d But he had misinterpreted her reaction. \u201cShe kind of tilted her head to the side, and got a really interesting look on her face,\u201d Williams says. \u201cAnd then I knew that what I was writing had the capacity to touch people. I had found a way of connecting to people through the songs. And I think that for many years that was my main connection to the world around me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But while both Someday Man<\/i> and its followup did well commercially, neither sold in quantities approaching the Three Dog Night or Carpenters records covering Williams\u2019 songs. Still, the combination of those cover versions\u2019 success and the promotion of his records did serve to get Williams noticed in a big way. \u201cMy management said, \u2018Let\u2019s get you out and expose you to a large audience,\u2019\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

He would soon play as an opening act for Liza Minelli, Olivia Newton-John and even Gladys Knight and the Pips. \u201cThey made me a Pipsqueak,\u201d he jokes. \u201cI spent a bunch of time on the road with them, and every time I walked onstage and performed for those huge audiences, there were at least eight or nine that kinda liked what I did.\u201d He\u2019s still kidding, but he does make a point: \u201cYou do that, and you begin to build an audience.\u201d That he did, parlaying his songwriting success into film and television roles, while continuing to write, record and perform live.<\/p>\n

Thing did go wrong for Williams as the 1970s and \u201980s wore on; while he continued to be creatively productive, he was succumbing to his addictions. \u201cI think that there was part of me that was separate from the world around me,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd the drug and alcohol use really exacerbated that. The combination of celebrity \u2013 where it\u2019s a task to go on the street \u2013 means you can have a tendency to kind of hide out when you\u2019re not performing. And yet you need the affection you\u2019re getting when you are performing.\u201d Displaying the self-knowledge that comes with having done the serious work of recovery, he says of those years, \u201cI became better at showing off than showing up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams eventually faced his demons and won, getting sober and going on to co-author a book, Gratitude and Trust: Recovery is Not Just for Addicts<\/i>. He and his wife Mariana (an author and storyteller) married in 2005, and today at age 77 he\u2019s as busy as ever.<\/p>\n

The sentimental nature of Paul Williams\u2019 lyrics is unmistakable, and he makes no apology for that. He quotes from yet another song he wrote for the Carpenters, 1974\u2019s Number-one hit \u201cI Won\u2019t Last a Day Without You\u201d: \u201cDay after day I must face a world of strangers where I don\u2019t belong \/ I\u2019m not that strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not the sort of thing that a John Wayne would have said or thought,\u201d Williams notes. \u201cBut it turns out there are a lot of people in this world who feel more like Paulie Williams than they do like John Wayne.\u201d And Williams\u2019 1970 album Someday Man<\/i> was a key early step on his long and successful career of expressing those thoughts and feelings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Three… Another characteristic of Paul Williams\u2019 lyrics is their universal quality. Listening to or reading his words, the thoughts and emotions expressed could as easily be coming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14851,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,51,64,73],"tags":[1670],"class_list":["post-14850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-pop","category-reissue","category-vinyl","tag-paul-williams","cat-41-id","cat-51-id","cat-64-id","cat-73-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14860,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14850\/revisions\/14860"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}