I will admit this: I cannot listen to any Carpenters song all the way through without weeping (sometimes quite loudly and openly). No matter who is singing the song – Ruben Studdard, Shonen Knife, the kids from Sesame Street – I can hear the hope and heartbreak in Karen’s voice and it just shatters me. This is no doubt very confusing to my toddler when I warble “Sing” to her every morning as we’re getting ready for preschool. I hope that someday she will understand. (Yes, I know I am a hopeless, hapless, giant dorko, and I don’t care … and yes, we have put away a nice sum for therapy, thanks for asking.)
I am a huge fan of the Carpenters though I wasn’t around when they were popular in the early 70s, I have her solo album and she sings a bit higher but it’s clearly a Carpenter CD. I read a reivew of it and Richard claimed that it was a bad album cause she stole the “Carpenter’s sound.” In another interview I read Olivia Newton-John defended Karen’s new lp by saying that Karen couldn’t steal “the Carpenter’s sound” because she WAS the Carpenters.
Karen sung low when few women singers did. As she was quoted as saying “The money’s in the basement.” The Carpenters came along when the really slow soft rock was popular and capitalized on it with phenomenal success. Remember back then singles were hard to come by not like today.
But like most groups music changed and the Carpenters didn’t change fast enough or were so entrenched in their sound they couldn’t sell the public. The Passage album was an attempt to broaden their audience but it lost the hard core fans and the public wouldn’t buy their change. Does this mean Karen’s voice was bad? Of course not, it’s just the public wouldn’t buy it.
Few singers can change with the time, indeed of the 70s only Olivia Newton-John and Rod Steward consistantly managed to transend the entire decade consistantly, while the biggest females like Helen Reddy and the Carpenters were absent from the second half of the 70s. That’s the music biz. (Other singers like Diana Ross managed to have hits through the decade but they were more or less sporadic, in Ross’s case she either hit number one or missed the top ten all together, but she was not concentrating on singing in the 70s)
I do think when you hear Karen’s voice it’s easy to project her problems into her music, but Karen did not write songs and Richard was pretty much the guiding force behind the Carpenters in terms of selecting songs, writing them, producing and establishing what Karen sounded like. It was almost as if Karen was just another instrument to Richard.
Yuuh! If yer inta fatties!
Actually, what I came here to say (before derailed by my poor taste in jocularity) was that my friend’s wife has a voice (speaking) just like Karen’s. I’m sure that he would never let her sing (he thinks that is a TOOL of SATAN :rolleyes: ) but I’ve often wondered what she could do…