Joseph Williams: What remains when the music stops

Joseph Williams grew up with the last name Williams when his father was composer John Williams. Let that land for a moment. The shark is circling beneath the water. A bicycle lifted into the moonlight. A small boy reaching toward the stars. Those melodies are part of our collective memory, and Joseph Williams heard them being written in the next room.

Most children grow up thinking their parents are the biggest figures in the world.

Joseph's father actually was.

I've spent a career as a psychotherapist listening to people sort through identity — who they are versus who they were raised to become. It is quiet, patient, sometimes painful work. And sitting with Joseph Williams in his home, I kept waiting to find the wound that comes with growing up in that particular shadow.

I found something else entirely.

What I found was a man who had stopped running.

Joseph lost his mother, Barbara Ruick, at 13. An aneurysm, on the set of a Robert Altman film in Reno. She left for the job and never came home. His father sat the kids down and told them what happened. And then, as Joseph puts it, there was a weird dispersal. He left home at 16. There were brushes with the law, motorcycles, broken bones and the kind of anger that a 13-year-old boy carries when God has just taken the person holding everything together.

"I was in shock," he told me. "Hurt and confused. Angry with whatever my idea of God was at the time."

He said it simply, without drama, the way people talk about things they've had decades to sit with.

What he said next stopped me cold.

He told me that spending four hours a day, five days a week, with his 94-year-old father has given him something he didn't expect. Not just time, not just history — though that John Williams at 94 is still writing music with pencil and paper and piano is its own extraordinary story — but healing. Understanding, finally, the depth of his father's loss. His parents were childhood sweethearts; his mother sang in his father's band at high school dances. She sat at the piano while he worked. She was the first audience for everything.

Joseph told me he never fully understood his father's grief until now, talking to him as an adult, as a man who has also loved and lost.

"I've received a lot of relief from my own pain," he said, "by being able to find out what it was like for him."

That is not a small thing. That is a man in his 60s finally making peace with something that broke open when he was 13.

In between, there was a lot of life.

Las Vegas. "Star Search." Session work. Jingles. A gig as a background singer for Jeffrey Osborne — "I was the sole white guy in the band," he laughed — that taught him about character as much as craft. Then Toto called. Then, a 15-year career composing for television. Then rehab. Then divorce. Then back to Toto, this time for good.

He mentioned, almost in passing, that he once left the music business entirely and worked hotel security and front desk for a year because he had a family to support and didn't know what else to do. A friend called him out of the blue and told him to quit, come to the studio and get back to work.

"I've been lucky to have the people around me," he said. "I owe so much to everybody else."

Coming from someone with his lineage, that sentence means something.

And then there's "The Lion King."

He went in to sing demos. He almost didn't make the movie — same story as "Aladdin," where he recorded everything and got cut at the last minute. But his wife suggested they let Joseph improvise the adolescent section of "Hakuna Matata" while he was already in the booth.

They liked it. They kept it.

He found out he was actually in the film when he and his wife attended a press screening and heard his own voice coming out of the screen.

The soundtrack sold about 18 to 20 million copies. His deal was a fractional percentage, prorated across the cast.

"A pretty nice taste," he said, "for two hours of work."

These days, when Toto is off the road, Joseph Williams picks up his grandchildren from school and brings them back to his place until it's time to take them home. Then he drives over to his father's house for dinner, baseball, football and conversations about music history, Hollywood history and what it was like to be a young piano player in the studio orchestras of the 1950s.

He just bought a house — small place, he said. Just for him. But the yard has a sports court, a small pool, a built-in trampoline and a putting green.

He picked it for the grandchildren.

He told me this is the best time of his life. He said it the way people say things they actually mean, not the way people say things for interviews.

I believed him.