Before the screaming arenas and the impossible glare of teen fame, “Being Together” introduced David Cassidy as a solo voice trying to make a pop record feel personal.
When David Cassidy released Cherish in 1972, the album carried more weight than a simple collection of songs. It was his solo debut, issued during the height of his fame as the young star of The Partridge Family, and it arrived at a moment when the line between television image and musical identity was unusually delicate. The opening track, “Being Together”, mattered because of where it stood: not buried in the middle of the record, not treated as an afterthought, but placed at the front door of Cassidy’s first album under his own name.
That placement gives the song a special kind of historical charge. By 1972, Cassidy was already a familiar voice in American homes, tied to a fictional family band that had become a real commercial force. The Partridge Family records had put him on radio and television at the same time, creating a kind of fame that was bright, fast, and difficult to separate from the character he played. Cherish, released on Bell Records and produced in the orbit of the same polished pop machinery that shaped much of his early success, did not completely abandon that world. It could not. But it did offer a new frame. Here was David Cassidy not just as Keith Partridge, not just as a face on a lunchbox or a voice coming through a sitcom speaker, but as a young pop singer stepping into his own spotlight.
“Being Together” opens that spotlight softly. It does not announce itself with rebellion or reinvention. Instead, it leans into the melodic, romantic language that made Cassidy such a powerful presence for listeners who heard sincerity in his phrasing. The song’s importance lies partly in its modesty. It begins the album not by tearing down the past, but by asking to be heard within it. The arrangement fits the early-1970s pop landscape: clean, accessible, built for radio warmth rather than rough edges. Yet inside that smoothness is a revealing tension. Cassidy’s voice carried a boyish brightness, but it also had a strain of yearning that made even polished material feel less disposable than it might have in another singer’s hands.
The title “Being Together” sounds simple, almost conversational, but on a solo debut it becomes more suggestive. Together with whom? A loved one, certainly, in the language of pop romance. But also together with an audience that had already claimed him intensely. Cassidy’s early solo career unfolded under extraordinary attention, especially from young fans whose devotion could turn a record release into an event. That makes the opening track feel like a handshake across a crowded room: gentle, bright, carefully arranged, and aware that the person singing has already been watched, adored, and defined by millions.
The album around it would become better known for songs such as “Cherish”, Cassidy’s version of the Association ballad, and “Could It Be Forever”, both of which helped shape the emotional memory of his early solo years. But “Being Together” has its own role to play. It is the first sound of the first chapter. It catches Cassidy at the threshold, before the solo image hardened into posters, tours, chart expectations, and the heavy machinery of celebrity. Listening to it now, the song feels less like a grand statement than a beginning made in good faith.
There is something moving about that. Not because the track claims to be more dramatic than it is, but because it belongs to a fragile moment in a young artist’s public life. Cassidy was trying to carry a voice from one context into another, from television fiction into the more exposed space of a solo record. The fact that “Being Together” opens Cherish means it becomes part of that passage. It is a reminder that even heavily managed pop careers contain human thresholds: the first song on the first album, the first breath before the audience decides whether to follow.
For those who return to David Cassidy today, the appeal is not only nostalgia. It is the sound of a particular early-1970s innocence, polished but not empty, commercial but often tender, carried by a singer whose life in public would become far more complicated than the songs first suggested. “Being Together” remains valuable because it preserves the doorway. It lets us hear Cassidy at the start of his solo story, still close to the glow of television fame, but already reaching toward something that might belong to him alone.
