The record in context

“Almost There” has one of the strangest career arcs in the Andy Williams catalogue. It was written by Jerry Keller and Gloria Shayne, and Williams performed it in the 1964 romantic comedy I’d Rather Be Rich, in which he also acted — a rare screen appearance for a singer who preferred the recording studio to the film set. Columbia released it as the B-side of “On the Street Where You Live” in August 1964. The B-side promptly outperformed its A-side, which tells you something about both the song and the singer: Williams could make a hit out of the disc’s second choice.

But here is where the story splits in two. In America, “Almost There” stalled at number 67 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a genuine hit that never was, though it did climb to number 12 on the Easy Listening chart, where his core audience lived. In Britain, it was a different song entirely: released there in 1965, it spent three weeks at number two and seventeen weeks on the chart, becoming one of his biggest British singles. His album Andy Williams’ Dear Heart was even retitled Andy Williams’ Almost There for the UK market, where it became his first album to chart there, reaching number four and spending 46 weeks on the list.

So the record is a transatlantic near-miss in both directions: almost a hit in America, almost number one in Britain. And that is precisely the song’s subject. “Almost There” is about the ache of nearly arriving — the distance between wanting and having, measured in inches. It is hard not to feel that the song’s chart story and its lyric are telling the same tale, and that Williams, of all singers, was the man to sing it.

Listen closely

Start with the title phrase, because the whole record turns on it. “Almost there” is a devastating thing to say: it means you can see the destination and cannot reach it. Listen to how Williams sings those two words — not with despair, but with a kind of suspended hope, his voice lifting on “there” as if the note itself might carry him the last few feet. The melody keeps rising toward a resolution it never quite delivers, and Williams, master of control, never forces it. He lets the almost-ness hang in the air, which is braver than it sounds. Most singers would have pushed for the big finish. He understood that the song’s power is in the withholding.

Then listen for the build. The arrangement starts small — voice, a gentle pulse — and grows steadily through the record, strings entering like light coming through a window, until the final chorus feels like it ought to break through into triumph. It doesn’t, quite. The song ends on yearning rather than arrival, and that restraint is the whole point. Williams’s voice stays warm and unforced throughout; there is no strain, no reaching, no desperation. The irony is exquisite: a song about not quite making it, sung by a man whose technical command is absolute. The control is what makes the longing believable — you trust a singer who isn’t trying too hard.

Finally, listen with the chart story in mind. America heard this record and shrugged; Britain heard it and kept it on the charts for four months. What did Britain hear? Perhaps a nation of romantics recognized a song about noble, dignified longing — the stiff-upper-lip version of heartbreak, where you admit the pain but never lose your composure. That was Williams’s entire art in a single record: feeling deeply while sounding perfectly calm. “Almost There” almost made it everywhere. In the end, almost was enough.

Consider the B-side that beat its A-side. “On the Street Where You Live” was the chosen single, the My Fair Lady showpiece Columbia expected to carry the disc; “Almost There” was the afterthought that outperformed it. There is a lesson in that about Williams’s instincts — or his audience’s. The show tune was the safe, obvious choice; the yearning original, the one about never quite arriving, was the one people actually needed. And Britain needed it most of all: the retitled album Andy Williams’ Almost There became his first British chart album, spending 46 weeks on the list. A song about almost making it ended up making him, across an ocean, in a market that had barely known him. Almost, it turns out, can be a kind of arrival — if you are willing to wait seventeen weeks for it.