(Credits: Far Out / A&M Records)
Tue 3 February 2026 10:19, UK
The mark of an exceptional singer-songwriter isn’t necessarily the ease with which they’re able to come up with masterpieces, but is quite often exemplified by the fact that they’re able to maintain a sense of consistency over a long period of time.
Paul Williams, while not necessarily a household name, has had an illustrious career, writing hit songs for a variety of different artists spanning from The Carpenters’ ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ and ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’, to Daft Punk’s ‘Touch’. Not only this, but his work composing for films, such as The Muppet Movie, Bugsy Malone and Smokey and the Bandit, the latter of which he also starred in, have all earned him significant praise in this field.
Despite his career having begun in the 1960s, Williams remains a songwriter for hire to this day, and that amount of longevity should be celebrated in itself. Many songwriters of this age will begin to wind down their output once they’ve reached their 80s, but Williams remains just as imaginative and open to contributing to the future of music now as he did during his prime.
However, while writing timeless songs isn’t something that always comes along without immense amounts of effort, when it does come easily, it’s often accompanied by the most thrilling feeling that your work has reached an unmatchable level of excellence.
During the 1960s and ‘70s, Williams wrote a handful of songs for US soft rockers Three Dog Night, with both ‘Out in the Country’ and ‘Family of Man’ both earning him hits for the band. However, there’s one track he gave to the group that sticks out to him for the ease with which he wrote it, and it remains one of the most beloved songs in the band’s catalogue.
‘An Old Fashioned Love Song’ is one of the band’s best-known tracks, and came to Williams in a sudden wave of inspiration when he wrote it in 1971. While the song isn’t necessarily the most complex, its simplicity is arguably what has made it so enduring, and exists as proof that sometimes, the greatest works don’t have to come to fruition as a result of hard labour.
In an interview with SongFacts, Williams claimed that the inspiration for the song came at a time when he wasn’t even meant to be in the songwriting mindset. “I had a date one night with a young lady named Patti Dahlstrom,” he explained. “She was a songwriter. We were going to go out and have dinner. And right before I left for the date I had gotten a phone call that I had a gold record. And I walked into her house, and I said, ‘Well, got a gold record for such-and-such, it just went gold. Kid did it again with another old fashioned love song.’ It just came out of me.”
He continued, stating that the phrase ‘an old fashioned love song’ prompted a wave of inspiration in him. “I went, ‘Wait a minute.’” he added. “I went over to her piano and I sat down, and it’s the quickest I ever had a song come out of me. And it sounds like it. It’s a really simple song, I wrote it in like 20 minutes. And it was a big hit.”
While the inspiration for the song might seem obvious, with him having come up with the idea simply by playing with the concept of a well-established theme in pop music, it’s still genuinely impressive that you can come up with a massive hit in such a short space of time, no matter how straightforward it might be.