A small, sunny vow about choosing each other—folded into two and a half minutes you can live inside.
Let’s plant the anchors first. “Together We’re Better” is a 1972 album cut by The Partridge Family, written by Tony Romeo with Ken Jacobson, produced by Wes Farrell, and placed on the group’s sixth LP, The Partridge Family Notebook (Bell Records, released November 1972). It runs about 2:39 and sits early in the sequence (side A, track 4). The session logs pin its recording to May 1, 1972 at United Western in Hollywood, the same burst of work that yielded “Looking Through the Eyes of Love.”
There’s television DNA braided through it, too. The song turns up on the show in Season 3—first in “Princess and the Partridge,” then reprised in “I Left My Heart in Cincinnati” (aired Jan. 26, 1973), where the episode’s song list even calls it out by name. If you remember hearing it through the soft blue of a living-room TV, you’re not misremembering; this was one of those three-minute scenes where the sitcom gave way to something gentler and truer.
The discography has one more neat footnote: while it wasn’t a U.S. single, “Together We’re Better” rode the flip side of the U.K. and European 45 of “Walking in the Rain” (Bell 1293 and territory variants) in 1973—a tidy pairing that makes musical sense: one song about holding on in stormy weather, another about the everyday work of being a pair.
Now—what it feels like. The charm here is all scale. David Cassidy doesn’t grandstand; he leans in. The melody rises just enough to make the promise sound possible, then settles back down where ordinary life can carry it. That’s Romeo’s gift—he wrote stadium-sized hooks when asked, but here he and Ken Jacobson aim for a kitchen-light kind of love song, the sort you can hum while drying plates. The lyric is plain speech—no puzzle-box metaphors, just the sturdy idea that two people are stronger together than they are alone. Older ears know why that lands: the sweetest parts of a life aren’t usually loud. They’re dependable.
You can hear the Los Angeles first-call band keeping the floor steady. The album’s personnel card reads like a little hall of fame—Hal Blaine on drums walking the tempo instead of muscling it, Joe Osborn or Max Bennett holding the bass line close to the root, Larry Knechtel and Mike Melvoin feathering piano and keys, and a three-guitar phalanx of Dennis Budimir, Larry Carlton, Louie Shelton, and Tommy Tedesco sketching light around the vocal. Farrell’s production leaves air in the mix; nothing elbows Cassidy’s phrases, so the chorus can feel like an invitation rather than a billboard.
What I love—and what many older listeners hear right away—is the song’s manners. It doesn’t tell you love is easy; it suggests it’s easier together, and then it behaves that way. The drums resist grandstanding fills. The guitars answer the vocal like friends who know when to nod and when to hush. Even the backing voices arrive like company, not a crowd. It’s the studio equivalent of setting another place at the table and pouring one more cup of coffee.
Placed where it is on Notebook, the cut acts like a hinge between the record’s brighter pop and its more reflective corners—an early, steadying breath before the big choruses and cover-song glosses take their turns. That sequencing choice says something about the whole Partridge project at this phase: yes, there’s TV sparkle and teen-idol heat, but underneath is craft—writers and players building songs to live with, not just to chase charts. (The album credits confirm the patient studio ecosystem that made that possible.)
And then there’s the way the tune has traveled. Put it next to the U.K. single coupling with “Walking in the Rain,” and it reads like a gentle answer to life’s drizzle: if the weather won’t cooperate, walk close, share the umbrella, keep moving. On TV, the same posture becomes plot—music as a way of saying out loud what a family can’t always say in plain dialogue. Decades later, those small mercies are what hold up. You don’t need memory to make the chorus work. The song meets you where you are and quietly widens the room.
But you don’t need any of that to feel what it’s saying. Press play and notice how your shoulders drop a notch by the second refrain. That’s the song doing what it was built to do—make room. It doesn’t dazzle; it keeps you company. And if you’ve lived long enough to prefer promises you can actually keep, “Together We’re Better” feels less like a relic from a TV family and more like what it always was: a modest, durable truth, sung with the kind of grace that never goes out of style.