The Album Thing: Carpenters, Carpenters

Okay, I’m participating in a Facebook fad. I was nominated by a dear friend to post something like ten album covers of favorite albums over the years, or something like that. There were a bunch of rules, but I’m gonna ignore them and just post photos of a bunch of my favorite albums over the years. Because that’s the point. So, we begin with something that should not be a surprise to anyone who’s known me for very long.

You know, I could fulfill this whole “favorite album thing” and with all Carpenters albums. That would be pretty funny, huh. Again, if you know me well, you’d know that wouldn’t be a stretch.

“Superstar” was one of the huge hits from this album. It’s a great example of the synthesis of the best of Richard Carpenter’s arranging and Karen Carpenter’s vocal magic. The story goes, he had to press her to sing it because she hated it at first.

“Rainy Days and Mondays” was another big hit from the album. And it was one of several Carpenters songs that was an exquisite study in depression. And no, no, in these days, there was no autotune in sight—this is all her (and their) real voices, painstakingly overdubbed.

Their famous Carpenters Bacharach-David medley is on this album—it was not a big radio hit, but as an arrangement it was a tour-de-force, featuring more amazing vocals. Here, I’m sharing a live version of it, in case anyone might think this virtuosity was all just “magic in the studio.” Actually in this live version, they use faster tempos than on the album. This kind of perfectionism might be one reason they ended up so burned out.

I would like to add that the last few years, I’ve read some really interesting stuff about Karen Carpenter. First, as a baseline, the Ron Coleman biography of the duo, which is the one Richard and the family approved of, so it tippy-toes around certain topics. Second, the book Little Girl Blue, by Randy Schmidt, is an unauthorized but respectful biography of Karen; it is the fuller, and focused treatment that she as an individual totally deserved.

But finally, I’d like to recommend a slim volume called Why Karen Carpenter Matters, by Karen Tongson, which really helped me understand that my young obsession with Karen Carpenter wasn’t ridiculous or sad and in fact was mirrored by many other people like me who stand outside the mainstream: “In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson (whose Filipino musician parents named her after the pop icon) interweaves the story of the singer’s rise to fame with her own trans-Pacific journey between the Philippines—where imitations of American pop styles flourished—and Karen Carpenter’s home ground of Southern California. Tongson reveals why the Carpenters’ chart-topping, seemingly whitewashed musical fantasies of “normal love” can now have profound significance for her—as well as for other people of color, LGBT+ communities, and anyone outside the mainstream culture usually associated with Karen Carpenter’s legacy. This hybrid of memoir and biography excavates the destructive perfectionism at the root of the Carpenters’ sound, while finding the beauty in the singer’s all too brief life.” I highly recommend it.