The record in context

The songwriters were in the middle of their own second act. Neil Sedaka, the Brill Building hitmaker of “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Calendar Girl,” had watched his career fade in the late sixties and was rebuilding it in the early seventies with a new seriousness. With lyricist Phil Cody he wrote “Solitaire” — a song about a gambler, alone at his table, playing out a hand that is really his life. It is one of the bleakest songs Sedaka ever wrote, and one of the best: a character study in three minutes, with cards standing in for every choice the man ever made.

Andy Williams recorded it as the title track of his 1973 album Solitaire, and the pairing was inspired. Here was the warmest, most reassuring voice in popular music — the man who sang Christmas into being — taking on a song about loneliness, compulsion, and a man who has run out of luck and company at the same time. The single became an Easy Listening hit, and in Britain, where Williams’s interpretive records always found their most loyal audience, it reached the Top 10. The album itself joined his long run of British chart successes.

What makes the record fascinating is the distance between the singer and the song. Williams was not a gambler, not a loner, not a man at the end of his luck — he was a beloved television host at the height of his powers. But great interpreters don’t need to have lived the lyric; they need to understand it. And Williams understood something essential about “Solitaire”: that the gambler at the table is not really playing cards. He is playing against himself, and losing.

Listen closely

Start with the opening, because Sedaka and Cody wrote one of the great first lines in pop: “There was a man, a lonely man, who lost his love through his indifference.” Listen to how Williams delivers it — plainly, almost flatly, like a man reading a headline about himself. There is no dramatic emphasis, no actor’s pause. The plainness is the point. This is a confession, and confessions are not performed; they are stated. Williams’s voice, usually so warm, takes on a cooler, more distant quality here, as if he is describing someone he once knew — or someone he fears becoming.

Then listen for the central metaphor unfolding. “He played the game, the game of solitaire” — the cards are a life, the table is a room with no one else in it, and every verse adds another layer to the portrait: the indifference, the pride, the slow realization that winning the game means nothing if there is no one to tell. Williams sings it without a wink and without judgment. He does not play the gambler as a villain or a victim; he plays him as a man, which is harder. On the chorus, his voice opens slightly — not into triumph, but into a kind of exhausted tenderness, the sound of someone who finally sees the whole hand he has been dealt.

Finally, listen for the ending, which refuses to resolve. The song doesn’t offer redemption or even regret, exactly — just the image of the man, still at the table, still playing. Williams lets the last phrases drift rather than land, and the effect is haunting: the game goes on because there is nothing else. It is the darkest record he ever made, and one of his most honest. The crooner who spent a career making everything sound warm and safe took one long look at a lonely man — and didn’t look away.

The song had a long afterlife that confirms Williams’s judgment. Neil Sedaka recorded his own version, and the Carpenters took it into the Top 20 in 1975 — but it was Williams who heard it first, in 1973, and understood what it needed: not drama, but gravity. He was forty-five, a television institution, the safest pair of hands in show business, and he chose to title his album after a song about a lonely man losing at cards. That choice was a quiet act of courage. The crooner who had spent a decade making America feel at home was willing to make it feel, for three minutes, a little less comfortable. “Solitaire” remains the outlier in his catalogue — the darkest corner of the warmest career in pop — and perhaps for that reason, the one his most devoted listeners treasure most. Anyone can sing a happy song. It takes an artist to sing this one.