With his youthful exuberance and passion for his industry and craft, it’s hard to believe that Paul Williams isn’t a newcomer to the songwriting world. He has been a pillar in that community for decades, stretching back to the hits he wrote for artists including the Carpenters (“Rainy Days and Mondays,” “We’ve Only Just Begun”), Three Dog Night (“Old Fashioned Love Song”) and Helen Reddy (“You and Me Against the World”), not to mention compositions for film (“Evergreen,” from “A Star is Born”) and classic television theme songs (“Love Boat”).
At 68, Williams has embarked on a new phase of his career, having been elected in April to succeed Marilyn Bergman as President and Chairman of the Board of ASCAP.
“I have worked closely with Paul during his eight years as a member of the ASCAP Board of Directors and particularly since he assumed the post of Vice Chairman,” said Bergman, who continues to serve as a member of the ASCAP Board. “He is an outstanding choice to lead the vital work that ASCAP conducts on behalf of all of us who create music.”
His responsibilities include exploring new markets and areas of technology to help writers and publishers fully exploit their catalogues, applying new technologies to track and monitor usage so that writer compensations can be made more accurate and fair, using his ability to perform in the public spotlight, cultivated onstage as an entertainer and in “Battle for the Planet of the Apes,” “Smokey and the Bandit” and other films and serving as the organization’s spokesperson.
“Part of my gig is essentially not to forget that this is about the songwriters and the individual artists and finding a way for us to keep up with the technology,” Williams explained. “I love new media and I love new technology. My wife says I’m addicted to it. She’s always telling me, ‘Paulie, step away from the iPhone and talk to me!’”
Having been on both sides of the fence as an artist and an administrator, this winner of Academy, Grammy and Golden Globe Awards and Songwriters Hall of Fame member understands the personal satisfaction that comes from writing as well as the fact that it goes only so far toward paying the mortgage. “As a writer, the first payment you get is mental health,” Williams said. “It’s free therapy. I mean, you get dumped by somebody and you sit down at the piano and you put some of those feelings down on paper. That’s very rewarding.
“The second payment is fair compensation,” he continued. “And the third payment is what I call heart payment. Someone comes up to you and says, ‘We got married to “We’ve Only Just Begun,”’ or ‘My mom was a single mom and “You and Me Against the World” was a really important song to her and she used to play it and she’d cry,’ or ‘My daughter learned to play piano to “The Rainbow Connection.”’ That’s heart payment to a songwriter. So the first and third kinds of payments are great, but you need the one in the middle to survive.”
Writers as well as their performing rights organizations bear responsibility for communicating the importance of that second payment. “Part of my message as President of ASCAP is to remind the public we write from the center of our chest, writing what we feel, and people are falling in love to it and dancing to it and teaching their kids to play piano to it," Williams said. "But we’re also small businesspeople. The songwriters that I represent deserve to be well compensated for that.”
As an example of what ASCAP can contribute, Williams cited Donny the Downloader, the animated character that the organization developed to teach young people about moral and legal issues related to illegal file sharing.
“I used to think we had an Ethics 101 problem,” he said. “But what we have is an education problem. People are not bad. People are basically good. They know that they can’t walk into a store and steal a CD. They know that’s wrong. But they’ve been taught that taking music off the Internet is OK. Donny the Downloader is this little kid on a skateboard. It’s also an educational device aimed at elementary-aged kids. And we do need to do a little more with the older kids — something similar with high school and college kids too.”
Williams believes that as long as young people think of record labels and music publishers as huge corporate conglomerates that don’t need the money, the likelihood of illegal downloading increases. “We need to get this concept of these behemoths fighting over a piece of cheese out of people’s minds,” he insisted. “There are a number of ways that we can do this. For sure, legislatively: We need to hit the halls of Congress and make sure they understand that as technology changes, we need to keep the laws abreast of it.”
Public relations is an essential complement to legal action, Williams added. “For me, that little ‘c’ in the copyright circle also stands for ‘collaborative’ and ‘communicative,’” he said. “I have a chance to maybe do some healing in my new position. We’ve had to do some work in the courts; when people get a license and then refuse to pay, we have to take them to court. But I want my message to be a little friendlier. I want it to be, ‘We’re not looking to seek and destroy; we’re looking to seek and develop relationships.’
There are incredible new avenues for generating revenue for writers. It’s up to us to discover those new avenues. We’re on the ball constantly, stepping forward to license ringtones and greeting cards. When you open a card and it’s got a couple of bars from ‘I Won’t Last a Day Without You,’ that’s pretty exciting for the songwriter. But you can’t buy potatoes with just the excitement of hearing your song in a card. You also have to be compensated for it.”
Based in Los Angeles, Williams plans to travel often to Nashville, not just to exercise his responsibilities as President but also because the city holds personal meaning to him as a songwriter. Recalling a visit in the ’90s for Tin Pan South, he said, “I basically thought I was done with writing. I had gotten involved in the recovery community. And, I swear to God, there is something in the water there. I hit town, and the level of comfort I felt there was incredible. I felt respected and I felt safe, and all of a sudden I wanted to write songs again. One of the first guys I wanted to write with was Jon Vezner. We sat down and wrote ‘You’re Gone,’ which two years later was a hit for Diamond Rio.
“What happened to me in Nashville was I fell in love with music again,” Williams elaborated. “I don’t think I would be the President of ASCAP, I wouldn’t even be on the Board at ASCAP for the past eight years, if it hadn’t been for the time I spent in Nashville. So I want to spend a lot more time in Nashville.”
In assessing the art of Country songwriting, Williams admires in particular its openness to lyrical depth. “What I’d been trying to do for a lot of years was not be myself,” he said. “I was trying to be clever instead of being honest. In a Country song, honesty is so much more important than being clever. There’s an amazing growth of creativity in Nashville. I want to be a part of that. Every genre of music is just exploding out of Nashville. And I want to get the young writers, the edgy writers, onboard and let them know that ASCAP is a great home for them.”
On the subject of new writers, Williams noted, “The music business has become so fragmented. And one of the changes, I fear, for new writers is that they may not have the chance to get the kinds of hands-on experience that I got when I wandered into A&M Records in 1967. What I got there was a publisher named Chuck Kaye, a co-writer named Roger Nichols and Herb Alpert’s record company, that all offered this amazing expertise that helped guide my career and the great choices that a publisher made on behalf of my songs. I think that’s going to be missing from a lot of careers today.”
It is clear that Williams has a heart for new writers. “Right now, there’s some young writer working at a keyboard with a headset on because the baby is sleeping in the next room and the spouse may have a day job so the writer can do this. And this person has an amazing gift and a chest full of pain and heartache and dreams. I want to help them get their music to the world.”
This empathy is more than professional. “I’ve had more 17-hour days since April than I’ve had in my whole life,” Williams said. “But I am a songwriter first. I’ll always be a songwriter. I’m not a songwriter because I make a good living at it, even though I do. I’m a songwriter because it’s part of how I know I’m alive.”
On the Web: www.PaulWilliamsConnection.org; www.ASCAP.com
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