Carpenters – We’ve Only Just Begun

The Carpenters’ wedding standard began as a bank commercial, and Paul Williams got it to them by promising a full song that didn’t exist yet.

The song that became a fixture at 1970s weddings began as a commercial for a California bank, and the bank pulled it because it worked too well on the wrong customers. In 1970, Crocker-Citizens National Bank wanted to reach people just starting out in life. Hal Riney’s advertising team handed songwriters Paul Williams and Roger Nichols a slogan and a storyline, a couple’s wedding and the road ahead of them, and the pair wrote the music in a single afternoon. The ad found exactly the audience it was aimed at: newlyweds with no collateral for the loans the bank actually wanted to make. The spot came off the air, but the song stayed.

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Richard Carpenter caught the commercial on television and recognized the voice. It was Williams himself, a writer on the same A&M Records roster as the Carpenters. The ad ran only two verses with no bridge, so Carpenter asked whether a complete song existed. Williams told him it did, and it did not. He and Nichols had never landed an A-side, and Williams admitted years later, in the documentary Close to You: Remembering the Carpenters, that they “would have absolutely lied through our teeth” to get one. They went back and wrote the rest. The song had already appeared once that year: Nichols’ friend Smokey Roberds released a version under the name Freddie Allen in March 1970, and radio ignored it.

Richard arranged it as a slow build. Karen’s low, unhurried lead sits over his piano and Wurlitzer electric piano, with woodwinds from Doug Strawn, Bob Messenger and Jim Horn, before the siblings’ stacked harmonies open the chorus up. Hal Blaine played drums and Joe Osborn bass, two of the most recorded session players in Los Angeles, and Jack Daugherty took the producer credit. The lyric is about a couple setting out with everything still ahead of them, and Karen sang it as plain fact rather than romance, which is why it fits a wedding and a graduation equally well.

From bank spot to Hall of Fame

A&M released the single on August 21, 1970, three months after (They Long to Be) Close to You had topped the Hot 100. This time Billboard’s Hot 100 stopped at No.2, but Cash Box ranked it No.1, Billboard’s easy-listening chart held it at No.1 for seven weeks, and Canada’s RPM chart sent it to the top as well. The RIAA certified it gold. Britain responded later and more coolly, taking it to No.28 in early 1971. The song earned Williams and Nichols a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year, and the album it came from, Close to You, helped the Carpenters win Best New Artist that spring.

For Williams and Nichols it was the breakthrough that made them a songwriting team other artists sought out, and they returned to the Carpenters with Rainy Days and Mondays. Williams also recorded his own full version for his 1971 album Just an Old Fashioned Love Song. The Recording Academy inducted the Carpenters’ record into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998, Rolling Stone included it in its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2011, and in a 2016 ITV poll British viewers voted it their second-favorite Carpenters song. Nichols died in May 2025, at 84.

Richard Carpenter, who heard a bank commercial and asked the question that turned it into a standard, turns 80 on October 15, 2026. The song makes the case the ad was built on and the bank abandoned: that the start of a life together is worth singing about simply. Crocker-Citizens wanted loan customers and ended up commissioning a wedding song, and the Carpenters made sure almost nobody remembers the bank.