A Melody That Caught Our Tears: The Tender ache of Where Do I Begin – A Song of Love’s Fragile Eternity, Wrapped in Sorrow’s Arms
In the winter of 1971, Andy Williams’ rendition of Where Do I Begin (Love Theme from “Love Story”) climbed to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Easy Listening chart, a haunting centerpiece from his album Love Story, which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. Released in January as a single, it rode the wave of the film’s tear-soaked success, selling over a million copies and earning gold status. Written by Francis Lai with lyrics by Carl Sigman, and produced by Dick Glasser at Columbia’s studios, it was the vocal echo of a movie that left us sobbing in theater aisles. For those of us who let it spin on our record players, it was more than a hit—it was a hand to hold through love’s sweetest, saddest moments.
The story of Where Do I Begin starts with a piano’s lonely notes. Lai, a French composer with an Oscar for the film’s score, crafted the instrumental theme for Love Story (1970), a tale of young lovers—Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal—torn apart by fate. Paramount pushed for words, and Sigman, a Tin Pan Alley vet, penned a lyric that cut deep, finishing it in a rush after the studio nixed an earlier draft. Williams, the king of smooth, stepped in late ’70 after hearing Lai’s melody on a promo reel for his TV show. Recorded in a single, hushed session—his voice trembling just so—it was a perfect fit, the strings swelling like a heartbeat under his gentle croon. It wasn’t just a cover; it was a confession, born from a film that hit us like a winter storm and a singer who knew how to cradle our grief.
Where Do I Begin is a question without an answer—a lover’s attempt to tell a story too big, too broken, to fit into words. “Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be?” Williams sings, his tone a fragile thread, tracing a romance “too much to take” that ends “in silent tears.” It’s about love’s peak and its plunge, the joy of finding someone and the agony of losing them, all in one breath. For us who heard it in ’71, it’s a frozen frame of shag carpets and wood-paneled dens, of snowy nights when the world felt small and fragile, when a song could make you clutch the one beside you a little tighter.
For those of us with lines etched by time, Where Do I Begin is a whisper from a softer past. It’s the glow of a TV airing Andy’s Christmas special, the rustle of a record sleeve pulled from a stack by the fireplace, the sting of a first love’s goodbye. Back then, it played everywhere—radios in parked cars, jukeboxes in quiet bars—its melody a shorthand for every tear we shed over Love Story’s doomed Jenny and Oliver. Williams didn’t just sing it; he lived it for us, his voice a balm over wounds we didn’t know we’d carry. It lingered—in weddings, in remakes—but his take is the one that haunts, a relic of ’71 that still pulls us back to when love felt infinite, even when it wasn’t. As years fade, Where Do I Begin remains—a sigh, a sob, a memory of when music held our hearts and wouldn’t let go.