Before the solo hits and the louder mythology, David Cassidy began Cherish with a song that sounded like a young star stepping carefully into his own name.
“Being Together” holds a quietly important place in David Cassidy’s story because it opens Cherish, his 1972 solo debut album. That placement matters. In 1972, Cassidy was not simply another young singer releasing a record. He was already living inside one of pop culture’s brightest and most demanding machines: The Partridge Family, the television series and recording phenomenon that had turned him into a household face and a voice heard from bedroom radios, variety-show speakers, and family living rooms across America. When Cherish arrived on Bell Records, produced during the height of that frenzy, it carried a question beneath its polished pop surface: could listeners hear David Cassidy apart from the character they thought they knew?
That is why “Being Together”, as the first track, feels larger than its running time. It does not need to announce rebellion, reinvention, or some dramatic break from the past. Instead, it works in the language available to Cassidy at that moment: melody, sweetness, directness, and a kind of carefully controlled youthful longing. The album’s title track, “Cherish”, a cover of the 1966 song made famous by The Association, would become one of the better-known pieces of Cassidy’s solo catalog, and songs such as “Could It Be Forever” would also help shape the album’s romantic pop identity. But before those more familiar moments arrive, “Being Together” opens the door with a simple emotional promise.
The song belongs to the early-1970s pop world where orchestral softness, close-miked vocals, and clean arrangements could carry enormous feeling without raising their voice. This was not the rougher singer-songwriter confession that filled parts of the era, nor was it hard rock defiance. Cassidy’s solo debut lived in a more delicate lane: crafted pop for a public that wanted tenderness, fantasy, and a recognizable voice close enough to feel personal. In that setting, “Being Together” becomes less a grand statement than an invitation. It asks the listener to step from the television image into the record itself, to meet Cassidy not through a plotline or a family-band frame, but through the intimate grammar of a pop vocal.
There is a particular tension in hearing Cassidy at this stage of his career. Fame had arrived quickly, and with it came a strange kind of confinement. The audience adored him, but adoration can narrow a performer’s room to move. His face was everywhere; his voice was associated with a fictional family group; his name could trigger screams before a note had even settled. Cherish did not completely escape that world, and it was not designed as an abrasive rejection of it. Still, the album marked a milestone because it placed David Cassidy on the cover and asked the marketplace to respond to him as a solo artist. In that sense, the opening seconds of “Being Together” carry the quiet weight of a threshold.
Musically, the track reflects the care and polish of Cassidy’s early recording environment. The sound is built to flatter the voice rather than challenge it with clutter. The rhythm is approachable, the melody accessible, and the arrangement leaves room for the kind of sincerity that made Cassidy such a compelling pop presence. His vocal style was never about overwhelming force. Its appeal often came from a more fragile quality: a brightness touched by strain, a clean tone that could suggest both confidence and pressure. On a song called “Being Together”, that quality is especially fitting. The title itself speaks in the plain vocabulary of young romance, yet the performance gains depth when heard against the reality of Cassidy’s life in 1972, when togetherness with an audience could feel both exhilarating and impossible to control.
What makes the track interesting now is not that it overturned the pop landscape, but that it preserves a specific beginning. It captures the moment when Cassidy’s solo recording career first presented itself to listeners, before later complications, before the reassessments, before the distance that time inevitably creates. The song sits at the top of Cherish like a curtain lifting. Behind it is the machinery of early-70s teen pop, the Bell Records era, the pull of television fame, and the commercial expectations surrounding one of the most visible young performers in America. Yet inside the track itself, the feeling remains small and human: the wish to be near, to be heard clearly, to make a connection that survives the noise around it.
For many artists, a debut album is a declaration. For David Cassidy, Cherish was something more complicated: a debut made after fame had already arrived. That reverses the usual story. He was not asking the world to discover him from nothing; he was asking it to listen past what it had already decided. “Being Together” is valuable because it begins that conversation with grace rather than force. It does not solve the problem of image versus identity, but it lets us hear the first solo note of that problem being sung.
Decades later, the opening track from Cherish can be heard as a small but meaningful milestone. It is a record from a very particular pop moment, dressed in the smooth textures of its era, yet it also points toward a larger human theme in Cassidy’s career: the search for a private voice inside a very public life. “Being Together” may sound, on the surface, like a bright romantic opener. But in the arc of David Cassidy’s story, it is also the sound of a young man standing at the front of his first solo album, surrounded by expectation, and beginning anyway.
