I guess anything can be faked. But she does have a partial cover of You’re So Vain out there, which is farther away from some of the others she is singing. And it’s the same voice doing You’re So Vain. So it’s just a good voice in a very similar range.
She definitely has the kind of voice Karen Carpenter had. If I can be a bit sceptical I can hear some digital voice manipulation.
KC was an exceptional musician. On many of their live performed songs she’d play the drums too. Not a drummer/singer/musician myself I have heard that it was one the hardest things to do.
She would “front” many of their bigger songs - “We’ve only just begun”, “Superstar” and probably should have been out front for all of them. She was no Phil Collins. But that - what 6, 7 - octave voice and she had stage personality too.
In this BBC video she is absolutely miked and this is truly live. I laughed just before the last song, their signature “We’ve only just begun” she says working with some producer “was a gas”
(would paste in youtube video and know there’s a workaround but just youtube search for carpenters BBC)
I agree. I think she has potentially chosen a tough road with covering The Carpenters (albeit that this choice may have been influenced by the fact that her natural voice is somewhere in that region already) - there is a wedge of Carpenters fans that make it their business to vehemently despise covers, tribute acts and homages, no matter how respectfully they are attempted (and more so than other fanbases I think).
I think what you can hear is some good production in the harmonies, something the 1970s would have struggled to get as cleanly as we can get now with digital tools.
The song sounds processed exactly the way the original was. Her vocals are clean with a bit of reverb. In the part that starts, “Sharing horizons that are new to us…” her voice is doubled, as Karen’s was on the original.
Here’s a video that cuts back and forth between the original. It’s quite amazing how close they got. Not just the lead but the horns, harmonies, background vocals, strings… Just excellent.
This guy disagrees. I tend to believe him. (start at about 5:30)
I’m a fair to middling amateur Elvis impersonator and I believe it is much harder to sing like Karen Carpenter than like Elvis. To sound like Elvis, you need the right vocal range and quality, and you need to get the well-known mannerisms down.
Many people can do that. You see a lot more reasonably good Elvis impersonators than guitarists who can play “Purple Haze” note for note. Or singers who can sing like Karen Carpenter.
I can’t carry a note in a bucket, but my version of Elvis’ Blue Christmas is killer!